Memory aids don’t always aid memory

Maude McDaniel, Columnist

(Maude is sort of enjoying vacation, so you have to read this column from March, 1983.)

Some people use hearing aids, and some use seeing aids, but everybody uses memory aids. You don’t have to be in my age group to need them either. Just the other day I heard a young mother count off her children on her fingers: “Let’s see now. Jump Slowly Round the Bend. That’s right, Jimmy, Susie, Ricky, and Brian.”

She was employing what is sometimes but not very often called a mnemonic device, a tool for assisting the memory. (Yes, you’re right! It does come from the name of the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne.)

There are all kinds, ranging from acronyms, like TGIF and FBI to rhymes and complicated systems for getting the memory going when it would just as soon forget the whole thing and watch television.

Some memory aids are old familiar ones, like “Thirty days hath September/April, June and November. All the rest have thirty-one, Except February alone, which has twenty-eight.” As poetry, that fades fast, but it’s served me well for years, except that I tend to get November mixed up with December, because they both rhyme with September.

Anyone who ever took music lessons knows the device for remembering the lines and spaces of the staff. In the treble, they’re “FACE,” for the spaces, and “Every Good Boy Does Fine” for the lines. (The bass clef always runs two letters below the treble ones. Or wait a minute, is it two letters above? Oh well, anyway, one of those — )

Then, if you master that, you get to go on to the really big time in musical mnemonics: flats and sharps. For flats, I learned “Fat Boys Eat Apple Dumplings Greedily,” and for sharps, “Good Deeds Are Ever Bearing Fruit, Children.”

Of course, students would be better off just memorizing these things (”Sure three flats, key of E flat, no prob”) but some never do. To this day, I have to duck my head and mumble around awhile to figure out what key I’m singing in.

“Doe a Deer,” from “The Sound of Music” is a mnemonic aid for singing the musical scale, and the old ABC song has helped first graders learn their alphabet for many years. The only trouble is, you get to be fifty years old and you’re still singing it. Quick, now. What comes after K? No humming, please.

Cumberland has a mnemonic aid of its own, only I can’t remember it. It lists the six main mountains you have to cross to travel from here to Washington, and it’s something about Mary Goes to School ... .”

Those are the only mountains I can ever remember, Martin’s, Green Ridge, and Sideling Hill, so I never get the memory device completely right. (Sometimes you have to know the stuff first to get the mnemonic device right.) If any of you out there remembers what the other mountains are, and what Mary does about them, let me know.

Bird lovers, I’m sorry to say, go to ridiculous lengths with their memory aids for bird calls. I’ve never actually met a white-throated sparrow who says, “Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody,” or a song sparrow who sings, “Maids, maids, maids, put on your teakettle, ettle, ettle,” and I hope I never do.

Lazy Americans aren’t the only ones who lean on memory aids. The English have a rhyme for recalling their kings and queens in order, which starts out breezily, “Willy, Willy, Henry, Ste/ Harry, Dick, John, Harry three/ One Two Three Neds, Richard Two/ Henry Four, Five, Six, then who?”

Maybe we could do the same for American presidents: “Georgie, Johnny, Tommy, Jim —” or, better yet, “Washie, Addie, Jeffie, Maddie/ Jim again, and Second Addie.”

Mnemonic aids don’t always work as they should, of course. There’s a sad story about a man who used them to remember the names of new acquaintances. His system was to rhyme the name with something that would remind him of the person, and it worked fine until one day he met a large woman named Mrs. Rumick. Naturally, he rhymed her up with “stomach.” The next time he met her, he said, “How are you today, Mrs. Kelly?”

Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland freelance writer. Her columns appear in the Times-News on alternate Sundays.