Here is an interesting piece of weather history that you might not have heard of. Back in the 1880s, John Park Finley, a member of the Army Signal Corps (a precursor to the Weather Bureau, which began in 1890) started making tornado forecasts based on his observations of the weather that often occurred when tornadoes formed. While he wasn’t always right, he had a pretty good record. But in 1887, the Signal Corps prohibited him from making tornado forecasts, worrying that the use of the word “tornado” would cause panic. This ban lasted for 60 years. You can read more about this from the Pacific Legal Foundation here.
Incidentally, Finley was also associated with another severe weather phenomenon, the derecho. A scientist named Dr. Gustavus Hinrichs reviewed Finley’s list of what he identified as tornadoes and realized that many of them were not tornadoes but straight-line severe wind events. He used the term derecho (Spanish for “direct or straight ahead”) to define these non-tornadic events since this term could be considered as an analog to the term tornado which is also of Spanish origin. You can read more about this at https://www.spc.noaa.gov/misc/AbtDerechos/hinrichs/JohnsDerechoStory.pdf.
