Maybe I’m the only one who does this and this thread will spiral down the toilet.
I sometimes create my own mnemonics to memorize things that I think may be useful to know at some point.
Here are a few.
The order of the Central American countries from Mexico to Panama:
Benny Goodman Eats Honey Nut Cheerios (Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, & Costa Rica)
The Ivy League schools, oldest to newest:
**Hey You Penny Pinchers, Charlie Brown Don’t Care **(Harvard, Yale, Penn, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, Colgate)
Mount Rushmore figures, left to right:
Would Jesus Rake Leaves? (Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Lincoln)
Whatta ya got?
mmm
I know I have some, but the only one I can think of right now is one that was made up by one of my classmates in a guitar class years ago. For tuning the strings:
I have some but they’re awful. I ususally use mnemonics to cram some list into temporary memory that I don’t want to waste brain cells on actually learning for keeps.
The sillier the better.
Kill Some Easy Chickens, Really Kill Every Chicken!
That one’s for memorizing the order of script-triggering events in FileMaker in which the script runs before the triggering event is allowed to complete.
Developer TMI:
FileMaker Inc. provides certification for its developers. Their tests are not practical tests but instead focus on memorization of product details, some of which are ridiculously arcane and not things you need to have memorized in order to be an efficient developer (i.e., things that, on the rare occasions you need to know them as a developer, are easy enough to look up). One such item is the freaking order of script triggering events.
Addl Developer TMI:
A script can optionally be triggered by any of a variety of events such as a layout loading or a field being exited or a record being committed etc. The developer sets that up. It is possible that a developer would set up multiple competing script triggers, such as one set up to fire on each and every keystroke and, on the same screen, one set up to fire on exit from a specific field, so that when someone tabs to get to the next field both scripts would theoretically fire.
I had a hunch that the developer certification test was going to ask me to specify the order in which competing triggering events would be handled. It’s arcane crap no one needs to know other than to past the cert test. Hence,
Just one. The modes of the major scale are Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian. I remember it by I Don’t Play Loud Music After Lunch. Having two L’s is bit of a problem but it’s not hard to remember that Lydian and Mixolydian go next to each other.
When I was in the sixth grade we were required to come up with a mnemonic to remember all the presidents in order, which I did at the time, which I no longer can.
Not a mnemonic, but when I first started getting into baseball, many, many years ago, I had trouble remembering which teams were in which league. I came up with a way to remember all of the then National League teams. I was never able to make up a good one with the expanded teams, but this one is burned in my brain forever:
The Giant Red Cub Met his Phill of Padres and Cardinals while Bravely Dodging Pirates at the Expo in the Astrodome.
Not the same as the sentence thing, but I do have the mnemonic I made up to remember which camel has one hump, and which has two:
Bactrian camels have two humps like a B
Dromedary camels have one hump like a D
Not my own, one I learned in college when studying psychology I learned that the light sensor cells come in two versions - the cone that processes colors and the rod that processes black & white. To remember, note that ice cream cones are colorful, while magicians rods are black.
My mother knew the classic “My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” and joked that now it would be “My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nothing”. Apparently the new version is “My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Noodles.”
I enjoy making up mnemonics – the sillier, the better – for practical purposes. Rather, I feel, in the same ballpark as Biffy’s “Sorry, Grandma…” above: when learning German at school, it was useful to remember those modifying monosyllables to verbs, which always stay attached to the front of the verb; unlike other such which can be shunted off to the end of the phrase / sentence: the “undetachables” are “be-, ent-, emp-, ge-, ver, zer- er-". To fix these in memory, I thought up the nonsense sentence “Be an empty verderer.” – a verderer being an official who in medieval England, looked after royal forests and enforced the law there.
Also mnemonic-making is sometimes just for fun. Inspired by the OP’s “Benny Goodman Eats Honey Nut Cheerios” for the Central American countries: I have devised a mnemonic for the chain of smaller West Indian islands, in order or pretty much so, all the way from Puerto Rico to the South American coast.
Uhtred Smith valiantly battles venomous axolotls so manfully, seeing brilliant shining stars – ‘e strikes Kenyans and Nepalese, Argentines and Belgians, madly glamorously. My good Dominic: mirror such lustre. Shrinking violets and the gutless, gibber: “threatening and terrifying !” Buffoons…
(US Virgins, British Virgins, Anguilla, St. Martin / St. Maarten, St. Barthélemy, Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Kitts & Nevis, Antigua & Barbuda, Montserrat, Guadeloupe, Marie-Galante, Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Grenada, Trinidad & Tobago. [and last, out on its own eastward] – Barbados.)
Of course there are such things as mnemonics which are harder to remember, than just the straight list of what needs to be remembered…
I never made up any but here are three I find useful. The first has already been mentioned above, but it is much older: Bactrian camels have two humps; Dromedaries have one. Kings Play Chess On Fine Green Sand.
(Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species)
Stalactites grown down from the Ceiling; stalagmites grow up from the Ground.
When I did real estate and legal property descriptions, I remembered the BIG number (4 digits) was the BLOCK, the LITTLE number (2 digits) was the LOT, and the SMALLEST number (1 digit) was the SUB-LOT.
I learned the guitar strings in the opposite direction (high note to low, or from the bottom of the fretboard to the top), and the mnemonic my guitar teacher taught me was:
Elvis Buys Guitars Down At Ed’s
When we were in high school, a classmate came up with a mnemonic for remembering the formulae for sine, cosine, and tangent:
Some Old Hens (sine = opposite / hypotenuse)
Cackle And Howl (cosine = adjacent / hypotenuse)
Til Old Age (tangent = opposite / adjacent)