we usually think of heavy rain, high wins, cloudy dies, and thunder and lightning. The biggest storms are the tropical storms in the West Pacific and the west Atlantic, the former called typhoons and the latter hurricanes or cyclones. The word Typhoon may have come from a Chinese words"tai tung." meaning peat wind, or rerhaps it came from an Arabic word. Nobody is really sure. The first typhoon was describod by a sea caption named William Dampier in 1687. Type Borns and hurricanes are given female names. Do you know why? Actually, the use of female names began as a joke a few years aner World War Before that, they had been named alphabetically and for a time, anor the names of certain Christian saints. Then, in 1947, when men were beginning to study weather seriously, the men who new their planes into the centers of storms in order to study them began to refer to cach storm by the name of their commanding officers' wives. When they ran out of names, they made them up, Later, sets of names starting with Anna, followed by Bemita. Caro, Laura, etc were developed. Today in the west Pacific four different sets ofnamos are usod to refer to typhoons, all of them female, And this is how female tuames came to be used. Now, the practice seems to have been accented, at laast for the mament. Who knows what will happen when the leaders of women's rights realize that the world's storms are all females?