In high school Western Civ class, the teacher told us that we could always remember that the Moors invaded Spain in 711 by thinking of a 7-11 and the Arabic person behind the counter.
Even worse…
in undergraduate, I had a Spanish professor that was a total idiot. No, really. He told us one day about the ‘etymology’ of two Spanish words:
(The following is absolute bs)
alimaña (wild animal) sounds an awful lot like the Spanish word for Germany, Alemania. The similarity exists because the Spaniards thought of the Germans as savages.
The Spanish word for Englishman, inglés, is only an accent mark away from ingles (crotch, inner thighs). This was because English soldiers frequently raped women.
:smack:
I still remember the time I actually asked the linguist in our department about those words, and he just laughed.
That same professor, while a graduate student, was being observed (teaching his introductory Spanish class) by a faculty member. As soon as the bell rang, he said, “OK, remember all that ser and estar stuff we did yesterday? Reverse everything I said - I got the usages backwards.”
This seems to be an ongoing situation, extending back quite a ways. We watched the '67 Arab-Israeli War unfold just after the end of the school year, but our history courses ended with the foundation of Israel and the Berlin Airlift with a passing reference to the Korean War.
Years later, a guy I worked with who was a few years older than I, and so should have lived through some of this stuff, made a comment to the effect that nothing had happened in the 1950s. When I started running down the list of the second Arab-Israeli War, the Suez crisis, the Hungarian revolt, the back-and-forth Cold War efforts in Greece and Austria, the India-Pakistan conflicts, the invasion of Lebanon, the Cuban revolution, the Cold War games that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. played in the Middle East and Latin America, the rise of the anti-colonial movement in Africa, the eviction of France from Vietnam and the breaking of the Peace Treaty by the U.S. backed Diem brothers, (along with bus boycotts, sit-ins, and Federal Troops ordered into the South by President Eisenhower to protect black citizens), he looked at me as though I had sprouted a second head and asked “when did that stuff happen?”
I suspect that Thudlow may have a point:
There has to be more history now than when I was in school (by about 40 years’ worth) and the anecdotes above show that kids after me got more recent history than I did, yet still fell short of getting “up to date” history while they were able to get 10, 20, or 30 years more history than we “had time for.”
I’ve never understood why people need complicated mnemnonics for this one. The big end of the symbol goes with the big number. That’s why they chose those symbols in the first place, and that’s all you need to remember.
And let’s not forget “Oh be a fine girl kiss me”, for the sequence of stellar spectral types (OBAFGKM).
A little OT, but alchemists and natural philosophers used to call copper “Venus,” because of its association with mirrors. (Mirrors were typically fashioned out of copper, before glaziers worked out a way to silver glass.)
This may be the first time anyone has said this on the SDMB, but your mind isn’t dirty enough. Those symbols mean male and female first, and Mars and Venus secondarily. Why they represent male and female is left as an exercise for the reader.
As for copper = Venus, those same alchemists used to call quicksilver “mercury”. Funny thing there is, the alchemical name is the one that stuck.
Be glad you (probably, by statistics,) have not heard the 10,000 Maniac’s song “Katrina’s Fair”, which mentions them in the wrong order! (Class and Order are mixed up in that song, and those were already the hardest two to remember.)
PMAT- Prophase, Metaphase, Anaphase, Telophase. The stages of mitosis, which is basically the term for what happens after a cell makes a copy of it’s DNA in preparation for splitting in two. The acronym doesn’t work anymore because someone decided to stick another stage between the first two.
PEMDAS- Used to remember the order of operations in math. Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction. We also learned it as a sentence: please do excuse my dear aunt Sally.
No idea whether or not you knew of the extended definitions all ready, and just never heard the acronyms. So, no offense intended if you do.
WTH- what the hell
Oh, I just remembered another one. FOIL, for multiplying binomials.
You know what? I always used PMAT myself, but no one ever taught me the acronym, so I didn’t make the connection. It’s like there are two dazed neurons left in my brain, trying desperately to synapse.
Men often just judge others on their penis, while women judge the whole person. I have no idea where I got that bizarre idea, but it still makes me laugh today.