Can't Remember the Title of This One

You know I'm always about a month behind on my NPR stories, because I download the podcasts and listen to them in the car when I'm driving into work. Today I heard a story from January 6 about Christopher Stevens, a man who wrote a book of mnemonic devices, Thirty Days Has September: Cool Ways To Remember Stuff. (The story is worth listening to; he talks about how this book came about as a way to teach his profoundly autistic son how to learn and remember things.)

I had mnemonics on my mind anyhow, because Julie recently started taking piano lessons, so she has learned the common mnemonics for memorizing the notes (FACE, All Cows Eat Grass, etc.).

Here are some of the mnemonics I have learned and used over the years:

• Roy G. Biv for the colors in the spectrum (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet)
• My Dirty Aunt Sally for the order of operations in arithmetic (Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction)
• For spelling: i before e except after c or when sounding like a as in neighbor and weigh.
• Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November. All the rest have 31, except February, which has 28, and in Leap Year 29. (I also learned the knuckle trick.)
• Spring forward, fall backward for setting the clocks.
• I can still picture "The House of Être," which was a diagram designed to help us remember which French verbs took être instead of avoir when forming the passé composé. (At the same time we were reading Poe in English, so I ended up conflating the two into "The Fall of the House of Être.")
• Righty-tighty, lefty-loosy for screwing and unscrewing things.

Of course, the mnemonic I learned for the planets is no longer accurate! That makes me feel a wee bit ancient.

What mnemonics do you use regularly, or do you remember learning when you were a kid?

Comments

[Elena]

Isn't there another mnemonic for the French verbs...Mrs Vandertramp, or something like that?

[Naomi]

When my dad taught me to read treble clef, he used the mnemonic, "Every good boy deserves food" for the lines. I always giggle when I think of that.

I use mnemonics all the time. Most of them are meaningful only to me, like the one I use to remember my sisters' respective zip codes. But then some of the real mnemonics -- I either don't remember them or have made mincemeat of them.

For example:

Thirty days have Septober, June, April, and no wonder
All the rest have thirty-one
Except grandma
And *she* smokes a pipe.

No, I haven't been drinking.

[Karen]

I learned "Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge," but Julie learned "Every Good Boy Does Fine."

My mother-in-law makes up words for everyone's phone number. Her best friend's phone number spells BIG FART.

(Maybe you should start drinking.... I'm just saying.)

[Conor]

We had Mr Vandertramp too :)

The 2 I use most often are:

- "Dad, Keep Plucking Chickens Or Face Getting Sacked!", which my biology teacher taught us for the order of taxonomic ranks (domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species)

- and "GET SMASHED", which stands for Gallstones, Ethanol/alcohol, Trauma, Steroids, Mumps, Auto-immune disease, Scorpion venom, ERCP, Drugs... all of which can cause pancreatitis. The scorpions are not so common in Ireland, unlike alcohol.

We had some terribly naughty mnemonics when learning anatomy but I couldn't possibly post them on a family-friendly blog! :-D

[Margaret]

Dr and mrs Vandertramp. I prefer the house myself. I use a lot of visualization memory tricks and weird ones. (I learned them in a memory class) For example, if I need cranberry juice, paper and bread, I visualize soaking the bread in the juice then using it to write on paper. I prefer to write my lists down, but if I don't have paper, it helps to make up a crazy story in my head.

[Green-Eyed Siren]

I have nothing to add as far as innovative mnemonics go (although I do stand strong in defense of Many Very Early Men Ate Juicy Steaks Using No Plates to remember the planets and asteroid belt, because I reject the reclassification of Pluto). But I LOVE The Fall of the House of Être. Fantastic.

[Elena]

HOMES--for the Great Lakes??

[steve]

Somehow I messed up my comment post..!

HOMES - Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior.

[Cathy]

I knew all of these except for My Dirty Aunt Sally, which might explain why I never did well in math. Have you read "The Madonnas of Leningrad?" It's a novel about a woman who worked at the Hermitage Museum during the seige of Leningrad and memorized the works of art on display there. A great read!

[Crystal Arcand (3Stairs)]

To this day, I cannot screw or unscrew *anything* without thinking, "Righty-tighty; lefty-loosey." It drives me nuts...

[DJay]

Here's another music one: Flies Can Go Down An Empty Bottle, for the order of sharps.
And I have always LOVED this one for the scale of mineral hardness:
Tall Girls Can Flirt And Other Queer Things Can Do
(Talc Gypsum Calcite Fluorite Apatite Orthoclase Quarts Topaz Corundum Diamond)
even though I have never once used it.

[Sheila]

WEIRDO for the uses of the subjunctive in Spanish (wishes, emotions, impersonal expressions, recommendations, doubt, ojalá)

[Vonaappot]

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