Nothing good has really ever come of the government of any country trying to tell its people they can’t call a thing by its name anymore, for whatever reason.

After all, I think everyone knows that a tornado is not like a ghost in a mirror – it won’t go away or cease to exist just because no one says its name.

In 1877, John Park Finley was the first person trained to assess and predict weather to really dig into the warning signs and conditions that preceded tornados. He dedicated his free time to the study of the phenomenon, compiling weather reports and poring over patterns.

Meteorologist Joseph G. Galway wrote an article about Finley’s work in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

“Finley continued to work in the Fact Room and in addition collected all known tornado reports from old records that covered the period 1794-1881. The first version contained many errors, some typographical. The paper was suppressed, corrected, and finally published as a Signal Service Professional Paper. It consisted of the most comprehensive climatology on tornadoes set forth up to that time. More important, his deductions in that paper became the foundation for a list of forecast rules that were developed over the next year or two.”

During the course of his research, Finley correctly identified a number of weather conditions that are present when tornadoes appear, and he also suggested ways for monitoring said conditions and relaying them to areas that need to be on alert.

He used spotters that made up a network of tornado hunters in high-risk areas, and in 1884, the time they gave people to prepare was priceless.

Most people agree that really the only thing one can do in the face of a coming tornado is prepare so that the loss of life can prevented. We can’t pick up and move our houses, but we can save human and animal lives if we have time to get them to safety.

But in 1887, the Signal Corps banned the use of the word “tornado” in weather reports. The reason, if there was one, appears to be lost to time.

“There is no material advantage to be derived from any, even the most perfect, system of forewarnings and attempts at protection.”

The people at the US Weather Bureau continued to stubbornly warn people about “violently rotating columns of air” that could be headed their way, however.

The ban stayed in place for 60 years, until WWII. Then the US developed a warning system that would help protect military sites, leading nearby civilians to push for their own warning system.

Now, tornadoes are devastating but not nearly as consistently fatal as they once were.

It turns out that sometimes, warnings aren’t just there to scare people, but to give them their best chance at survival.

Who knew?

If you found that story interesting, learn more about why people often wake up around 3 AM and keep doing it for life.