Monday, January 13, 2014

It's True! All Cows do Eat Grass!


Is there some kind of mnemonic device that lets you remember how to spell mnemonic?


It's not overly straight-forward, is it?  


So mnemonic devices are simple, yet sometimes remarkably inane ways to memorize things, usually lists.  For example, the order of the planets can be remembered using the phrase "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas," or the more current "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles," since Pluto's unfortunate demotion.  For some reason, people are more able to remember that nonsensical phrase than "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and possibly Pluto."  Hooray, Oxford Comma!  

The same holds true for fictional mnemonic person Roy G Biv, which is a name nobody has ever heard outside of mnemonic devices.  Roy reminds us the order of colors in the spectrum is "Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet," even though this particular list is the only place you will ever use the word "indigo" to describe a color.  There Is Proof.

Either way, mnemonic is a difficult word to spell.  In fact, I've only gotten it right once while typing this...of course, I misspelled "typing" while typing that sentence, so I'm not necessarily the best example on this topic.  Like a handful of other words that have a bizarre silent letter to start, like pneumonia or psychology, mnemonic starts with a letter completely other than the sound the word makes at the beginning.  I have no idea how to remember this, so unless somebody comes up with a pithy mnemonic device for this, I'm afraid I'm going to have to rely on spellcheckers.  We awl no how well that can Gogh.  

No comments: