Not common ones like the order of the planets or “righty-tighty lefty-loosey” for the direction to twist a screw or a faucet handle. I mean ones you’ve made up yourself that could help others. Thank you.
In 4th grade, I learned about < and > for less than and greater than and remembered which was which because the smaller part of the sign points to the smaller number. Unfortunately then I wrote a few comparisons like
5
V
2
assuming that it worked vertically as well as horizontally, the smaller part of the “V” pointing to the smaller number.
Gross anatomy requires a ton of memorization, at least it did when I was in med school.
I came up with a mnemonic so I could remember the names of the carpal (hand) bones. It honored an elderly spaniel of ours.
“Portia’s toes, long and scaly,
have corns, terrible and tremendous.”
(pisiform, triquetrum, lunate, scaphoid, hamate, capitate, trapezoid, trapezium).
*there is a famous mnemonic dating back 100 years or more for remembering the cranial nerves. It has been sanitized in recent times, as it apparently is no longer acceptable to refer to fat-assed Germans.
Not one that I came up with personally, but a high school classmate of mine came up with this mnemonic to remember how to calculate sines, cosines, and tangents. Forty years later, and I still remember it.
“Some old hens cackle and howl 'til old age.”
“Some old hens”: sine = opposite/hypotenuse
“Cackle and howl”: cosine = adjacent/hypotenuse
“'Til old age”: tangent = opposite/adjacent
Ok, I didn’t invent this one, but it always cracks me up.
During HSC Chemistry back in the 70s we were studying redox reactions when “The Aunty Jack Show” started and Aunty Jack’s catch phrase became the mnemonic.
Oxidation: you rip it’s bloody electrons off.
Closely related 10-year-old thread I remembered posting to about 5 years ago:
My contribution then and now, for connecting jumper cables in the “right” way:
DePP NuDGe – Dead car’s Positive to Positive; Negative to Dead car’s Ground
There was some cranial nerve mnemonic that was recited on St. Elsewhere once that had my father (gross anatomy professor) snarling because he said it didn’t teach the order.
The only ones I’ve made up:
I’m a Dr. to help remember the dependent and independent variables in an experiment. Dependent is responding and independent is manipulated.
Can’t remember whether mitosis or meiosis produces the sex cells? It’s mei OH OH OH sis! (OK, I taught high school biology but never told that one to my students!)
Who is the phos phor? US!
For spelling phosphorus correctly. The kids always wanted to add in an extra “U” or two, but didn’t have any troubles with the ph parts.
Also, there is NO flour in fluorine! (or fluorescent)
“Communists drink wine” = facing forward, the port side of a boat is the left, and starboard is the right. I owned a cruising sailboat for a time, and had to invent that to remember. (The allusion is ancient, and in modern times boats seem to dock at least as often on the starboard side – e.g.- the Titanic, in the movie of the same name, but also I believe in old newsreel footages.)
In high school biology class, my seat mate and I came up with the following taxonomy almost-mnemonic:
Kelly, File Class Order For Group Sex (File sounding like Phylum). Yes, there was a very hot girl named Kelly in the class.
Back when I was a graphic artist, for remembering standard guitar tuning:
‘Every Artist Does Good Business Everyday’
Works as a mnemonic device, but unfortunately, hardly true as a factual statement.
Reign vs rein
A king reings
A horse has reins.
When you get the two confused, the one with the G in it is the one that means “to rule over”.
Deductive vs. inductive reasoning - how to remember which is which? INduction means “IN fact”. As in: “This crow is black; this crow is black; in fact, all crows are black.”
Not one I made up but the best one I’ve heard
Toronto girls can flirt and other quirky things Canadians do.
Moh’s scale
I thought of another one-- When discussing international events whenever North Korea was in the news, I kept having trouble remembering, between Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong-Un, who was the father who died awhile back, and who was the son currently in power. So I came up with this handy mnemonic:
Kim Jong-IL got IL and died.
Kim Jong-UN is the UN-ly one left.
I didn’t make it up, but a beautiful one for that is
“Kings Play Chess On Fine Grained Sand”
Another one I didn’t make is for digits of pi:
“Now, I have a rhyme assisting my feeble brain its tasks resisting”.
That’s fantastic! Exactly the type of thing I hope people will post in this thread.
Dessert has two ss’s.
Desert has one.
The one you want more of has more ss’s.
I’ve always used mnemonics to remember my vehicle’s license plate ID. In my state we get new plates every 7 years, whether we need them or not. I started doing this long before the advent of cell phones with cameras and I’m not likely to stop. My first car’s license was BUP 168, which I chose to remember as “bupkis”. A recent one started with LBL, which I remember as “Long Beach Lover”, not because I love Long Beach itself, but because I did business there and visited at least annually and it fit the license.
I tend to do similar mnemonics with surnames that have unique spellings or pronunciations.