I hadn’t. Until I saw a multipage advertisement in the back of a book I was reading. It was printed in 1920. The Pelman Institute was founded in the 1890s to help people develop their brains – in particular, their memories. The most lasting after effect was the card game they developed. When I played it as a kid, we called it Concentration. A grid of playing cards (16 cards were used in Pelmanism) are laid face down. Each player turns over two cards, and if they match, they remove those cards, and continue playing. Otherwise, the next player gets their turn. There was also an old TV game show based on this idea.
The “system” was taught via twelve (later fifteen) “little grey books.” That phrase caught my attention. Since Pelmanism pre-dated Agatha Christie’s writing days, I was wondering if this phrase inspired Hercule Poirot’s “little grey cells.”
I only know it because of the Ogden Nash poem “The Strange Case of Professor Primrose”. The Professor is incredibly absentminded, goes off to study at the Pelman Institute and disappears. He is later discovered working on a train, having accidentally gone to the Pullman people and become a porter.
ETA: Apologies for the accent ascribed to Pullman porters in the poem. It’s just a wee bit racist.
A British source called what I call a “concentration game” (like the game show) a pelmanism. I thought, those wacky Brits! Why do they have to have a different word for everything.
Linked from Wikipedia, here’s an online game for learners of English. Functions just like “Concentration,” but the webpage specifically calls it a Pelmanism game:
I panicked when I read about something culturally popular in the 20th century that I’ve never heard of. Then I saw it was British. I don’t do British.
Cell greys came from early 20th century explorations of the brain. Grey matter was distinct from white matter, and found mainly in brains and the spinal cord. Therefore, they were linked to intelligence. Anybody keeping up with science, or more likely popular science, in the day would make the connection. Newspapers regularly carried articles on grey cells (or gray cells in America) and the more literary journals mentioned them whenever brains were being discussed.
I think Christie may have been the first to use “grey cells” - the cells that process information - as a synonym for intelligence, though. It was a literaryism that caught on.
I was just saying that “little grey cells” sounds so much like “little grey books,” which was apparently very widely known in the UK in the early 20th century.
From what I know, Pelmanism was a made-up word, and the Institute was intended to strengthen memory and “brain power.”
I also never heard the term “Pelmanism”, but I’ve known the game since I was a small kid as “Memory™” (in Germany, where English words for consumer products are frequently used). There are many thematically different variants of the game, ours had a nature theme and depicted native (to Germany) animals and plants.
