![]() ![]() Biv, you can use "Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain." (That mnemonic has a bonus feature: it tells you who lost the Battle of Wakefield, waged in 1460 between the Houses of York and Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses.) The longer the order, the more involved the acrostic gets. When the list doesn't lend itself to an acronymic reading, it can instead be treated as an acrostic, with the initial letters of the listed items corresponding to initial letters of words in a mnemonic phrase. VIBGYOR! (And sure enough, now that I look, a writer named Walter Herries Pollock wrote a story way back in 1874 featuring a cruel Prince Vibgyor.) I personally prefer reading the mnemonic the other way around, as Vibgyor, which you could imagine as the name of a rampaging warrior. Biv, anyway? I've read that he's supposed to be a leprechaun who spells out the rainbow, but to me he sounds more like a mild-mannered accountant. Biv for the colors of the visible spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). Most of these mnemonics, however, have a particular order to memorize, as in Roy G. When the list isn't in any set order, it allows for more freedom in creating a mnemonic: for instance, HOMES helps you remember the names of the Great Lakes, even though there's no signficance to the order of Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. Many mnemonic devices are acronyms to help you remember items on a list. There are also acronyms that expand to create a sentence encapsulating a rule thus, OILRIG is a handy mnemonic in chemistry to remember that Oxidation Is Loss, Reduction Is Gain (meaning that oxidation results in the loss of electrons, while reduction results in the gain of electrons.) ![]() Some mnemonics are simple rhymes, like "Thirty days hath September." or "I before E, except after C." Others are acronyms to help you remember the spelling of tricky words: if you have trouble spelling rhythm, just remember the first letters of Rhythm Helps Your Two Hips Move. But there's an endless number of other mnemonic devices that get passed down from generation to generation, covering just about every field of human endeavor. Biv spells out the initial letters of the seven colors in the spectrum, for instance. Some of these memory aids are extremely well-known: most everyone knows Roy G. Earlier this week in the Book Nook section of our Educators page, we featured an excerpt from Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher's Learning Words Inside and Out, all about how teachers can use mnemonics to help students commit words to memory. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |