My sixth grade teacher, I assume to make a weird point about how English is basically a massive loose pile of exceptions, had the whole class come up with a torturedly extended version of the "I before E except after C" rhyme. This was almost 30 years ago but I still remember some of it:
I before E, except after C
Unless it sounds like an A
As in "neighbor" and "weigh"
"ch" and "sh" don't count as a C
etc.
this might be insufficiently weird but I use it every day at work:
IgG testing shows infections that are Gone
IgM shows infections that are M-mediate
This reminds me of the one i needed in college physics: CATions are a positive sight
the one I got was CATions are PAWSITIVE
the lesson included hand gestures
my mom thought of this mnemonic to remember how to spell "icicles" for a grade school spelling test. regarding aging eyesight:
"i see... i see... less!"
a cabbie relative taught me "Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest"
each word stands for two streets of downtown Seattle, going south to north: Jefferson, James, Cherry, Columbia, Marion, Madison, Spring, Seneca, University, Union, Pike, Pine
I learned that one when I first moved here and I'm always surprised when there are people who don't know it, especially ones who are natives! (I learned it from someone who grew up here, at least.)
I have never forgotten the two mnemonics for geologic periods and epochs that I learned in college:
Camels Often Sit Down Carefully, Perhaps Their Joints Creak
Cambrian Ordovician Silurian Devonian Carboniferous Permian Triassic Jurassic Cretaceous
Practically Every Other Monday, Penguins Play Hopscotch
Paleocene Eocene Oligocene Miocene Pliocene Pleistocene Holocene
yoo that mnemonic for the cenozoic rules i'm going to start using that
i shared it as a share but for the sake of comments completion i use "cold oysters seldom develop many precious pearls; their juices congeal too quickly" for the geologic time scale which is somewhat out of date but makes up for it in being memorable enough that the deviations of the modern time scale are easily spotted and recalled
Haha nice! It’s funny that they all seem to involve animals for some reason. :)
The camels mnemonic seems to be somewhat widespread as you can find it on Google, but the penguin one is nowhere to be found so I wonder how many people use it.
"Standard" guitar tuning is (from low to high pitch) EADGBE: Every Aardvark Digs Great Big Excavations
My main reference for mnemonics is how people get into arguments about how you HAVE to multiply/add first because of PEMDAS. So I'm not a fan.
But I do repeat "lefty loosy, righty tighty" every damn time I screw something in. Which I learned from a damn comedy sketch in Cirque du Soleil: Varekai, of all things.
That's always dumb. Multiplication and Division are besties, as are Addition and Subtraction. I wonder if that's an aspect they just forgot to teach in some schools or something
Righty Tighty Lefty Loosy, for me, was "The right oppresses, the left liberates."
a book I read as a kid had a chapter about the protagonist's brother annoying the shit out of her by constantly repeating the phrase "eebee geebee back da freezee," which turns out to be a mnemonic for the notes on the treble clef
i had completely forgotten a thing from sixth grade: Patty Made A Taco, for the phases of mitosis, and i was like psh but it didn't work because i don't remember what it stands for but when i expended 3 seconds of thought i did actually remember prophase-metaphase-anaphase-telophase
the funny thing was that my science teacher didn't use this mnemonic because she lowkey thought it was stupid as hell. and yet here i am, remembering, just because so many other sixth graders chanted Patty Made A Taco all the time. so suck on that mrs lemon
and this isn't a mnemonic but i can also recite the entire climactic speech from The Crucible because the other english teacher was giving out a few points of extra credit on one specific test if you got it right. and, again, other tenth graders repeated it so many times (overdramatically) that it's still in my brain 15 years later. will i ever be free
There is a linux command to view every directory/file, sorted by the size it takes up on disk:
du -chx / | sort -h
Which I remember because it puts my ducks in a row. (Pronounced by Sean Connery.)
we've always liked "please excuse my dope-ass swag" for PEMDAS even though we never have trouble remembering PEMDAS
It's not really a mnemonic, but I tend to have intensely exaggerated ways of pronouncing words like beautiful in my head to remember how they're spelled.
Tho there's also one that's like...really gross for memorizing the color codes on a resistor, which I ironically enough, struggle to remember, despite people claiming that "naughty" ones are easier to remember. Guess there's a threshold before your brain just kicks it out outta spite.
i remember stalagmite for Ground, and stalactite for Ceiling. I think that's common?
but my partner remembers that stalagmites might fall, so they're the ceiling ones, and stalactites are fastened tightly in place, so they're the ground ones. And then she also remembers that it's wrong, but memorizing the wrong one and also the fact that it's wrong is somehow easier than learning a correct one. 😆
I was told Stalagmites stand up with all their might, Stalactites hold on Tight.
vin diesel has ten weapons
ven di sal has ten ve pon se <- the common irregular imperatives in spanish
This one, which a classmate came up with in primary school, has stuck with me for (mumblemumble) years:
My Very Expensive Mercedes Just Smashed Up Near Pinner
(Pinner being a local-ish area at the time so replaceable as necessary, because Pluto still counts in my heart)
Also, one from the radio: "going for dinner with Billie Piper", which is the street order in Soho (London) - Greek, Frith, Dean, Wardour, Berwick, Poland
