Deep Mnemonics

Making the most of memory.

Last time out, I discussed basic mnemonics like “Roy G. Biv” for the rainbow’s colors and a “deeper” kind that was useful when you needed to remember more than the initials for things. I suggested such a deep mnemonic might be useful in remembering the identities signified by the LGBTQIA+ label. And here it is:

Charles, bianually publishing a yellow billet, ran statuesque erstwhile sprinters' exultant faces in surplus issues.

This construction has its imperfections. It uses the shortened forms of some identities—bi for bisexual, trans for transgender, ace for asexual. This has the side effect of one identity “nesting” within another—lesbian contains the letters in bi—but that’s mitigated by the fact that the identities are presented in order.

The reason for using the shorter forms is probably obvious: the longer a word is, the harder it is to hide within other words, and the longer versions of those identities can’t be hidden well at all. (You can sort of “hide” asexual or bisexual in phrases like extra sexuality or alibi: sexual encounter, but that doesn’t feel like it’s “hiding” very much.)

And without the “hiding” element, you don’t have a good mnemonic. “Red makes orange when mixed with yellow; green-blue is the color of the ocean; indigo and violet are colors but also plants” doesn’t work as well as…

Scared to range between synthesized yell (owned by Ogre Enzo) and woodwind, I go play viol eternally.

I’m not sure who the DJ Ogre Enzo is, but I can understand the musical choices involved here.

The “transgender” and “asexual” examples above show that this method won’t work for everything. I tried a construction that contained the names of all the Olympian gods, but I couldn’t find anything that’d work for “Hephaestus.”

I can also finish off the “state capitals” exercise from those early Word Ways issues. They got all of them except the Dakotas, and the presence of a couple of famous people named Dakota in modern pop culture suggests options:

Oliver North, Dakota Johnson, and Seth Rogen let ash from cannabis mar CK One jeans.

Though the Twilight franchise soon went south, Dakota Fanning’s performance was one of its happier results.

I had a bigger problem just thinking up relevant assignments to try. “Why can’t I remember the things that I’m always forgetting?” I asked Janice, who has learned to put up with such questions by now. In fairness, Janice sometimes asks me “Am I forgetting to do anything?” Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know.

So maybe this game is best played to serve one’s personal needs. For instance, I often need to remind myself of chores like vacuuming, doing dishes, cleaning litterboxes, filling water bowls, and taking out the trash. So:

Oh, vacuous Di; she’s got a full-of-glitter box-office show at Eritrea, where extras have extra sparkle.

Let’s see if this helps me out.