What Are Your Favorite Traditional Mnemonics?

General Memory Chat
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What are your favorite traditional mnemonics? We could compile an interesting list.

Some examples:

  • ROY G. BIV for the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet
  • PEMDAS for order of operations: parentheses, exponents, multiplication and division, addition and subtraction

Here are some that I learned when I was a kid that I still use:

  • North East South West: Never Eat Shredded Wheat. If you don't know what Shredded Wheat is, another mnemonic is: Never Eat Soggy Waffles.
  • Left and right: I lose track of left and right unless I make an "L" shape with my left hand. I haven't needed to do that in the past few years, but I still have to visualize which hand I write with before I know the difference between left and right.
  • Music: see this music theory thread

Here are some other interesting ones:

Atmosphere layers - The Strong Man’s Triceps Explode: Troposphere, Stratosphere, Mesosphere, Thermosphere, Exosphere.

Number of days in each month:

month-knuckles_cc.png

(Image © Tijmen Stam under CC BY-SA 3.0 license.)

Do anyone know other ones?

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Mr. VEM J. SUN

Mercury - Venus - Earth - Mars - Jupiter - Saturn - Uranus - Neptune

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In England for the rainbow spectrum we say: Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain.

For the Planets it was: My Very Easy Method Just Shows Us Nine Planets

Then there’s things like “right is tight, left is loose” for turning a screw.

The fates of the six wives of Henry the Eighth: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.

I remember SOHCAHTOA, which we said Sow Cah Tow A. It was the Sine = Opposite over Hypotenuse, Cosine = Adjacent over Hypotenuse and Tangent = Opposite over Adjacent.

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Soh-cah-toa is known by a lot of high school students in Nicaragua.

Also PODMAS.

I don’t know, nobody uses mnemonics. :frowning:

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I too still have to use the left-right hand thing and Never Eat Shredded Wheat. And the counting off knuckles to work out how many days there are in a month.

I no longer live in Britain but always remembered how to wire a British plug with bLue on the left and bRown on the right.

British plug