Mnemonics

I like mnemonics: those easily-memorized sentences that jog your memory so you can recall a hard-to-memorize list, like "Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally" to remember the order of operations (parentheses, exponents, multiplication/division, addition/subtraction), or "Oh, be a fine girl: kiss me right now, sweetie" for the stellar classifications O, B, A, F, G, K, M, R, N, S.


Mnemonics can be silly, but they're less effective if the words seem so arbitrary that the mnemonic itself is hard to remember. "Make Venus Eat My Jello, Serena’s Up Next" delights me with its topicality, but I'm not sure how well it would help a student remember the order of the planets from the sun. Why should Serena's being up next justify making Venus eat your Jello?

A good one should have a simple, logical, vivid meaning. "God's Eternal Love Never Dies", for the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) is particularly apt, and would have helped the contestants on Jeopardy last week. (None of them could remember the Bible's third book: a sad sign of our times.) I'm told that "Eat all dead gophers before Easter" helps people tune their guitars, and it certainly is a vivid image.


I wonder if other people also compose these things for themselves. I invented one for the nations of Central America: "Beehives give extra-special honey near clover-ridden parks): for Belize (formerly British Honduras), Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama. "Good boys don't fake affection" gives the notes of the bass clef, and is less vapid than the "Good boys do fine always" standard. Another original with me, regrettably incomplete and absurd, helps me remember the order of the biggest Canadian provinces from west to east, at least up to Quebec: "Become a slow-moving old Quaker" (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec). I see there are better ones online.


I'd love to be able to remember, for instance, all the nations of Africa, but there are more than fifty of them. That's probably going to take several sentences ...