"Examination are formidable even to the best prepared," wrote Charles Caleb Colton nearly 200 years ago, "for the greatest fool may ask more than even the wisest man can answer". This may be so, as much in meteorology as any other discipline, but now and then examiners come across some entertaining theories propounded by those students who are less prepared than others. One hopeful, for example, asserted in his answer-book that "the low heavy clouds we see are called columbus clouds". Another was of the view that "the heaps of sand in the Sahara are called whirlwinds", while a third, asked to name a gas that was lighter than air, responded: "Lighting". "A moraine means heavy rain" has a certain quirky etymological sense about it, and in the case of the student who wrote "A rain shadow is a piece of ground, and when it rains it is not touched," you can see where his or her ideas came from.
Neither, however, was as evocatively articulate as he who described snow as "frozen water gone fluffy", adding for good measure that "hail is when it hasn't". But top marks for vocational disorientation must go to the originator of: "A tornado is a kind of steak." Some answers, however, display, not too little knowledge, but too much. An examiner who asked the simple question: "Show how it is possible to determine the height of a tall building using a barometer", and expected to be told that the pressure difference between the top and bottom of the structure could be used to calculate the height, encountered an imagination more vivid than he had expected. "Take the barometer to the top of the building," went the answer: "Attach a long rope to it, lower the barometer to the street, and then observe the length of rope required." Alternatively, the examiner was told, "you could drop the barometer form the roof and time its fall; from this a simple calculation will allow the distance travelled to be calculated." Or trigonometry could be used: "Take the barometer out on a sunny day and measure the height of the barometer, the length of its shadow, and the length of the shadow of the building; simple proportions can be used to calculate the building's height." But the simplest solution was that tendered last: "Knock on the janitor's door, and say `Dear Mr Janitor, if you will tell me just how high this building is, I will give to you this very fine barometer'."