Schoolboy Howlers

The following gems of wisdom were gleaned from test papers and essays from elementary, junior high, high school, and college students of USA.

As one teacher noted, "It is truly astonishing what weird stuff our young scholars can create under the pressures of time and grades!"

• Water is composed of two gins, Oxygin and Hydrogin. Oxygin is pure gin. Hydrogin is gin and water.
• Blood flows down one leg and up the other.
• Dew is formed on leaves when the sun shines down on them and makes them perspire.
• Mushrooms always grow in damp places and so they look like umbrellas.
• Momentum is what you give a person when they are going away.
• To prevent milk from turning sour, keep it in the cow.
• The parts of speech are lungs and air.
• The inhabitants of Moscow are called Mosquitoes.
• A census taker is a man who goes from house to house increasing the population.
• Most of the houses in France are made of plaster of Paris.
• The spinal column is a long bunch of bones. The head sits on the top and you sit on the bottom.
• The word trousers is an uncommon noun because it is singular at the top and plural at the bottom.
• Iron was discovered because someone smelt it.
• Syntax is all the money collected at the church from sinners.
• Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.
• The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire's in the East and the sun sets in the West.
• Gravity was invented by Issac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the fall when the apples are falling off the trees.
• Finally Magna Carta provided that no man should be hanged twice for the same offence.
• After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.
• Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.
• Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel.
• Handel was half German, half Italian and half English. He was very large.
• The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn't have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.
• The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up.
• Queen Victoria was the longest queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years.