Do you have a special way to remember the number of days in the months, the order of the colors in the rainbow or how to remember that sweet foods after a meal are spelled dessert and not desert? If so, then you are using a mnemonic. A mnemonic (pronounced ni-mon-ic) is a song, saying, acronym or some association used to remember something such as using your knuckles to remember which months have 30 or 31 days.
Some people use the acronym mnemonic ROY G. BIV as a way to remember the colors of the rainbow.
For dessert and desert, a mnemonic is dessert is something you want to enjoy more so it has two Ss, whereas a desert is hot and dry, so you want to go through quickly with only one S.
A mnemonic that many American school children use to remember that Columbus arrived in America in 1492 is the poem, “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”
Another useful mnemonic that helps differentiate between the often-confused words AFFECT and EFFECT is the simple mnemonic of shared letters: Affect = Action, Effect = rEsult.
For a personal example, the locations of Kashima and Kashiwa were a challenge for me to remember, and I would often get them mixed up until I came up with a mnemonic. Kashiwa is west of Narita, and Kashiwa and west have a W. This simple mnemonic has cleared up the confusion I used to have. What mnemonics do you use? Erik