Woodyard - Non-Essential Mnemonics: an Unnecessary Journey into Senseless Knowledge

Copyright 2014 by Kent Woodyard

Illustrations 2014 by Mark Downey

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Prospect Park Books

www.prospectparkbooks.com

Distributed by Consortium Books Sales & Distribution

www.cbsd.com

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress. The following is for reference only:

Woodyard, Kent

Non-essential mnemonics: an unnecessary journey into senseless knowledge / by Kent Woodyard 1st ed.

ISBN: 978-1-938849-29-9

1. American wit and humor. 2. Mnemonic devices. I. Title.

Design & layout by Renee Nakagawa

To my friends. You know who you are.

Disclaimer

This is a work of fiction. The data sets included are true and (predominantly) accurate, but all other elements of the book are utter nonsense and should be regarded as such. At no point was research or anything approaching an academic process employed during the writing of the mnemonic descriptions or prose portions of this book. Any quotations, historical descriptions, or autobiographical details bearing any resemblance to realities in the world around us are coincidental.

Contents

H eres a question for you: What did you eat for dinner on this day, three and a half weeks ago (Thursday)?

Assuming the night in question wasnt the scene of a cataclysmic breakup, a violent spectacle of bodily fluid, or some combination thereof, and assuming you werent at a presidential inauguration, Cirque du Soleil show, or some other similarly transformative event, Im guessing you have no idea.

And its not just dinner three and a half Thursdays ago, is it? If I was a compulsive gambler, Id bet you cant remember most dinners that occurred before, lets say, yesterday. And Im not picking on dinner. If youre anything like me (and why wouldnt you be?), you probably cant remember most of your life that predates the last moon cycle.

Sure, youve got a cracked cell phone screen, some unread emails, and a growing collection of scars and receipts giving evidence to the passage of time, but the lions share of your life experiencesthe ones that didnt occur in emergency rooms, national parks, and police stationshave likely dissolved into a fog of half-imagined recollections that may or may not have happened in the way you remember, but that almost certainly involved a Taco Bell drive-through at some point.

I once heard that people forget eighty percent of the things they learn in college. Incidentally, I had a college professor who told me he had forgotten more about microeconomics than I would ever learn. (Jokes on you, Dr. AckersIve forgotten all of it!) Most people interpret this statistic to mean that eighty percent of college is a waste of time, which is generally correct. The broader point here, though, is that all of us will forget nearly everything we ever learn, and theres no point in getting all weepy about it.

But what if there was a way to stop forgetting? What if there was a way to capture those fading memories and imprison them forever in the musty cellar of your brain? What if we could all acquire a Good Will Hunting-esque level of long-term recall that would amaze our friends and foil our rivals while scoring phone numbers from vaguely exotic coeds at college bars?

Well, scrape your brains off the ceilingthere is. Theyre called mnemonic devices, and theyre magical.

Mnemonics are insidious little tools used by educators to ensure that information stays lodged in students brains decades after it is needed or desired. Depending on your attention span during grade school, and your tolerance for unnecessary consonants, you have likely met dozens of these devices over the course of your formal education. Dozens could mean at least two.

In elementary school it was My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos (the planets in the solar system) and Roy G. Biv (the colors of the rainbow). In high school and college it was a filthy assemblage of homemade sentences valued more for their graphic descriptions of fetish-heavy intercourse than for their functionality as memory aids. (Heaven help the lists laden with Ps, Vs, or Fs.)

But no matter which mnemonics you have encounteredwhether learned or handcrafted, G-rated or NC-17know this: They work.

Mnemonic devices are the reason I can still recite the order of biological taxonomy and the proper spelling of Mississippi fifteen years after I have had cause to do either. They are the reason I can name more Schoolhouse Rock songs than United States senators. They are the reason I know that the Great Lakes spell HOMES but have to request a new password every time I use PayPal.

This is the magic of mnemonics. Theyre like diamonds. And Ben Harpers love. Theyre forever. And that is why they are the remedy for all that ails us. Especially now.

In case you havent noticed, the early decades of the twenty-first century are shaping up to be a particularly unfortunate time for the human brain. SAT scores are down. Jeopardy ratings are plummeting. Bill Nye the Science Guy hasnt exploded anything on television in years. According to the 2012 U.S. Census, there are nearly three times as many fake IDs in the United States as there are library cards. The Princeton Review reports that 174 seniors who graduated college in 2013 attended their commencement ceremony with a BAC higher than their GPA.

This is the post-digital world. A world in which attention spans are measured by commercial breaks rather than class periods, and in which literacy appears to (finally) be on its way out.

But it doesnt have to be.

Thanks to the miracle of modern mnemonics (and thanks to me for assembling this travel-size compendium), the path has been paved for you to outwit, outplay, and outlast the mind-numbing forces of the basic-cable-industrial complex. In the pages that follow, you will find countless data sets covering the entire corpus of human experiencefrom sports, to politics, to science, to celebrity, to other obscure yet essential miscellanies. Each list has been strapped to an intercontinental ballistic mnemonic and will soon be screaming toward your cerebral cortex.

Dont ask me how they work. Its got something to do with science, andlike all science that hasnt been narrated by Morgan Freeman or turned into a condimentI have little interest in it. What Im interested in are results, and the results of mnemonic devices speak for themselves.

Think Im exaggerating? Finish this sentence: I before E except. Thats a mnemonic. Or how about this one: Now I know my ABCs, next time. Thats another one. And this one: Damn the tequila, said the matador. What, you dont recognize that one? You will once Im finished with you, that and dozens more just like it. Once read, each of these mnemonics will immediately and indubitably transform itself into acquired knowledge that no amount of drinking or professional football playing will be able to erase.