SCHOOL BOY 'HOWLERS'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 9, 4 March 1909, Page 357

SCHOOL BOY 'HOWLERS'

Here are a few more scholarly mistakes : — Switzerland is a very wonderful place ; you can often see the mountains touring among the clouds; Newman- Avrote- tracts which, were printed in the Times ; Vergel was a man who used to clean up churches ; Africa is a very dark place nearly covered with trees and animals; Oliver Cromwell's home~ policy was that of being a good husband and a kind father, his foreign policy was to walk abroad in a big slouch hat and a very large red nose; John Bright is famous for an incurable disease ; Doomsday Book is another name for Paradise Lost ; the Gordian knot was united by Lord Kitchener when he took Khartoum and cleared up the tangle into which we had got over General Gordon; chivalry is when you feel cold ; and chaplets are small places of worship. A most amusing collection of schoolboy ' howlers ' is published in the University Correspondent. Habeas Corpus is what the people used to say to the undertakers at the time of the Great Plague of London in 1666. It meant ' You may have the body.' No one knows whether, where, how, when, or why Homer was born. Queen Elizabeth's face was thin and pale, but she was a stout Protestant. An axiom" is a thing that is so visible that it is not necessary to see it.