I’m fascinated by mnemonics, those phrases and poems to help you remember stuff.
As an electronicer I well know the one for the color code order: Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly
From my interest in astronomy, the order of the planets: Mother Very Thoughtfully Made A Jelly Sandwich Under No Protest – guess that one will have to be edited with Pluto’s demotion.
One of my interests is heraldry. Blazoning is in a world of its own with terms and usages seen no where else, mostly in French (gemel? mullet?). Since I don’t do it regularly, I have to refresh it from time to time and yesterday I came across a neat primer by the SCA. One of the things I could never remember are the gouttes (drops). They’re just a stylized shape in the standard tinctures (colors) but can they be described with the usual names for colors? No, they are described by what kind of drop (French bastards).
Anyway, the primer had a neat song useful for correlating the goutte to its proper tincture (Earworm warning!)
D’eau: a goutte, a silver goutte.
D’or: a drop of golden sun.
D’huile: a name for olive gouttes.
Poix: a pitch-drop on the run.
Sangue: a needle-prick that’s bled.
Larmes: the tears of blue that flow.
Vin: a drink with thou and bread
That will bring us back to d’eau d’eau d’eau d’eau …Here is the page in question.
I also know a variant of the dirty cranial nerve mnemonic. Of course you also need to know whether each cranial nerve carriers sensory information, motor, or both giving you this mnemonic:
Some Say Money Matters But My Brother Says Big Boobs Matter Most
And there are various ways to remember the branches of cranial nerve 7:
Temporal, Zygomatic, Buccal, Mandibular, Cervical
To Zanzibar By Motor Car
Two Zebras Bit My Cock
Two Zebras Bit My Chihuahua
DesertDog
I’m surprised that you don’t know another astronomy mnemonic. This is for memorizing stellar spectral classes from hottest to coolest:
**O B A F G K M R N S
** Oh be a fine girl, kiss me right now sweetheart.
I bet someone will come along with the “dirty” version.
That’s for the first stops, outbound from Philadelphia, along the Main Line (yes that Main Line) of the old Pennsylvania Railroad (now SEPTA’s R5 Paoli). Overbrook, Merion, Narberth, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford and Bryn Mawr, all in order.
There’s a couple I learned back in high school:[ul][]Colors of the spectrum: Roy G Biv (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet)[]The Great Lakes: Super Man Helps Every One (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, Ontario), which has a slight advantage over “HOMES” in that it’s in order from West to East[/ul]
Please Excuse my Dear Aunt Sally
Parentheses, exponents, Multiply/Divide, Add/Subtract (Order of operations)
I always hated Mnemonics. It’s so much easier to remember PEMDAS. I know it’s much easier to remember RBBSFBH (Responsiveness, breathing, bleeding, shock, fractures, burns, head injury…steps to evaluating a casualty) that it is to remember…eh, whatever sententce it was they taught us to remember. I also prefer the planets as MVEMJSURP. Am I alone on this?
The lines on a music scale, EGBDF - every good boy deserves fun, that and the my very educated mother just showed us nine planets which Joey P already mentioned are the only ones I remember learning
Am I the only one who doesn’t get the point of such things? Why is it easier to memorize two things (the menmonic+the words the represent) rather than just memorize the thing you actually need to remember? OTOH, I never had a problem with memorizing things by rote.
Besides HOMES (great lakes) and Roy G BIV (colors in a rainbow) the only one I can recall learning is Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge… but I forget what it was for!
