The boy sat in his room, at his desk, scratching his head.
He could never remember that word. It haunted him that there were ways that would help him remember it, or any word, or any set of words, or even numbers. The intention being that it can assist the memory. It is a very old device that people have used for ages. He just couldn’t think what it was called! He needed it for his essay. It was really annoying that he could remember what this thing did, but not what it was called.
He knew there was several types that could deal with spelling, images, words, music, names, rhymes, and so on. They could be very useful. He knew for instance that in music, the lines on the staff where E, G, B, D and F, remembered by saying every good boy deserves fudge. He could use Roy G Biv for the sequence of colours in a rainbow; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. He had learned helpful rhymes like In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and ‘i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’.
For the weather, there was red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning. In chemistry he had used bat to remember the depressant drugs – barbiturates, alcohol, and tranquilizers. The phrase by your blocks get ready helps to remember the Olympic rings of blue, yellow, black, green and red.
All of these, and even the one that he had only recently managed to commit to memory, my very excited mother just served us nine pies for Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.
He had been really impress at school, the day his mathematics teacher had stood in front of the class and said, “May I have a large cup of coffee?” There was a lot of giggling of course, but also a growing sense of curiosity. He went on to explain that this was a method you could use to work out the value of pi. After writing the sentence out on the board, he showed the class that the number of letters in each word corresponded to the numerals in pi, this being 3.1415927.
Thinking back to this, he was jolted into remembering that he had scribbled a note in his book at the time. He rifled through his schoolbag and came up with a notebook. After flipping pages over he found what he was looking for.
Eureka! He had made a note for himself in the margin, it read, I knew Monique had a bad memory.
Ha! Mnemonic! I found you!