MNEMONICS

I start out my essay saying “Happy Birthday Fr. Gregor Mendel.”  Mendel, the father of modern genetics, would have been 190 years old today. He must have had a nice life out there in the garden: he lived to be 62. The mean life expectancy in the early 1800’s was 46, taking into account a high rate of infant mortality.  Now in Austria, where Mendel was born, the life expectancy is almost 80. I’m guessing that someday we’ll be able to change the ‘would have been’ to ‘will be’ when referring to the birthday of someone about to enter their 200^th decade.

All of which leads me to Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy. (He’d have been 305 this past May, and I really can’t see a time when we’d live that long, yet one never knows.) But…I digress.

I must confess that when I learned of Mendel’s birthday I had a Senior Brain Spasm and mixed him up with Linnaeus as being the one to start us off on our current scheme of ‘binomial nomenclature’ (Oooh – say that three times fast! – binomial nomenclature, binomial nomenclature, binomial nomenclature. No!:  that, that, that!)

Linnaeus is the one responsible for us calling ourselves homo sapiens. Man the wise – well, I sometimes wonder about the ‘wise’ part, don’t you? I recently learned that ‘they’ find about 20 new species a day in the Amazon region. They must go bonkers dreaming up new Latin names for those. (They must go bonkers being all that time out there in the jungle.)

All of which leads me to mnemonics, the real topic of my essay. A mnemonic is basically described as any technique that aids memory, and one of my favorites, learned back in high school biology, was “King Phillip Came Over For Grandfather’s Spectacles.”  K,P,C,O,F,G,S: kingdom, phylum, class order, family, genus, species. We are Animal, Chordate, Mammal, Primate, Hominidae, Homo, Sapiens. See that? Thank you Mrs. Rapacz. 

I'm not too familiar with the new additions of domain and life.  Life? What's the alternative?  The system has become a lot more complicated since I was in high school. 

I’ve written about another of my favorites: 
Roy G. Biv. Remember him? Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet: the colors of the spectrum, the colors of the rainbow. Learned that one in General Science.  Thank you Mr. Pinkard

In Mariner Scouts I picked up “red, right, returning” as a way to remember navigational aids, but all on my own I realized that right and starboard were the long words, and left and port were shorter. That one’s come in handy many times.
I learned about ‘starboard’ from a Norwegian admiral who took us to the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo. Most people were right-handed, so the rudder, or steering oar, was on the right side of a ship as you faced the bow. The Old Norse words meant ‘the side from which to steer.’  The side was the ‘board’ – well, they were board sided ships – and now we ‘board’ a boat or ship. One thing leads to another.

Here are a few other mnemonic gems from my collection:

In March, July, October, May the ides fall on the fifteenth day. That ditty I learned in Latin I. Caesar and togas and forums, oh my! Thank you Mr. Matthews. 

Then there’s always “righty-tighty - lefty-loosey” for screwing and unscrewing jar lids and light bulbs and other screwables.

And HOMES for the first letters of the five Great Lakes.

The grammar mnemonics include “I before e, except after c,” but weirdly, it doesn’t always work that way.

My piano teacher taught me “Every Good Boy Does Fine”, the notes on the lines of the treble clef in music, and FACE for the spaces.  I like “Fat Albert Can Eat” for that one – just learned it today.

Travel expert Rick Steves gave me the hint to remember that as the words Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian get more syllables, the style goes from plain to very ornate. That bit will come in handy next time I redesign the Parthenon.

Strange, the almost useless bits of information I retain.

Mnemonics Now Erase Man's Oldest Nemesis: Insufficient Cerebral Storage