by Walker Royce
Our brains are well suited for remembering complex things like pictures, structures, songs, smells, tastes, spatial relationships, emotions, and faces. We use these to make sophisticated models of the world we live in. Our memory banks store such complex things very effectively. Most people have trouble remembering a poem or an essay word for word, but when those words are put to music, it is amazing how easy it is to remember them, with the tune acting as the mnemonic.
Much of the information we want to remember is presented as long strings of words on a printed page. Although writing is great for conveying complex logic and arguments, our brains do not easily store and remember written information. Mnemonics are particularly useful to students who need to memorize certain lists of stuff. They are also useful to anyone trying to remember trivia or knowledge needed for everyday purposes. In 9th grade biology class, I struggled to remember the proper order of the taxonomic classification of living organisms.
Kingdom
Phyla
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species
My classmate and I came up with a simple mnemonic as a memory aid: Kings Play Chess On Fine Green Sand. I have never forgotten that silly phase—partly because it is silly, but mostly because the associated words combine into an image that my brain is good at recalling.
Another example is the order of the planets in terms of their distance from the sun.
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto (Although Pluto has been stripped of its planet status, I still use it for my mnemonic.)
My Very Excellent Mnemonic Just Speeds Up Naming Planets. This phrase is easier to remember than the list and gives you confidence in determining the correct order. Here are a few other examples of mnemonics.
I before E except after C. A simple rhyme to help us in spelling.
Every good boy deserves favor. The treble clef stave notes. And you thought it was just the name of a Moody Blues album!
Roy G. Biv. The sequence of colors in the visible spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally. Used by programmers and mathematicians to define the order of operation for mathematical expressions: parentheses, exponentiation, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction.
HOMES. The five great lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior.
Spring forward and fall back. An easy way to remember how to reset clocks when daylight savings time comes and goes.
A simple poem to remember how many days there are in each month:
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November.
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting February alone,
Which hath but twenty-eight, in fine,
Till leap year gives it twenty-nine.
The last rhyme doesn’t work for me; I still have trouble remembering which months have 31 days and which don’t. I prefer a nice visual mnemonic that is easily created by putting your fists together, thumb to thumb, and counting the months across the high points and low points of your knuckles (see Figure 2-1). Each high point (knuckle) is a month that has 31 days; each low point is a month that has 30 days (or 28/29 for February).
FIGURE 2-1. Using Your Fists to Remember the Days in Each Month
JARGON
Jargon is one of the joys of our language. Lawyers have their own jargon; so do doctors and engineers. Those are professional, somewhat formal examples of domains with their own jargon, but you can create your own! Among a select group of people, you can create jargon, or your secret code, that only people in your club understand. We all do this all the time. You probably know of some word usage that only your family understands. Using dee and deepa as synonyms for grandma and grandpa is a good example. These are clearly the mispronunciations of a family’s first child that were considered cute enough to stick.
Jargon is a serious complication for non-English speakers who are trying to learn the language. Here’s a true story that influenced my use of jargon. At a presentation in Korea, I was simultaneously translated while speaking to a rather large audience. The audience had the option of wearing headphones so that the people who couldn’t comprehend me, the English speaker, could listen to a translation in Korean.
What this entails is rather complex. In a soundproof box at the back of the room, two translators listened to me in English and translated into Korean. This is one of the hardest jobs in the world; it takes two people because they need to alternate every 10 minutes or so. The translators usually go over the presentation material in advance to get a feel for the word usage and the technical terms that might be diffcult to translate. The translators emphasized how important it was for me to speak slowly and methodically and to avoid the use of American jargon because it just does not translate well.
This was the first time I had ever been translated. I was fascinated and somewhat anxious. A colleague of mine spoke first. He is a brilliant speaker, but he talked fast and used a tremendous amount of engineering jargon and folksy humor. The Korean audience seemed riveted, even though he did not adjust his speaking style much. Even his jokes received an authentic laughing response, although slightly offset by the few-second delay of translation. One joke in particular seemed like it should have been complete nonsense outside the United States nerd programmer community. It was something about “getting hosed by overusing go-to statements and ending up with spaghetti code.” Even to English-speaking nonprogrammers, this phrase should have been almost unintelligible.
After my colleague finished, I went to the soundproof room to compliment the translators and assure them that I would speak more slowly and without all the funny business. The translators were dripping with sweat; they looked like they had just gone three rounds with Muhammad Ali. I told them I was amazed with their ability to translate the “getting hosed” joke. The younger translator looked at me and smiled. He said, “Well, I told the audience that this joke does not translate into Korean. Please laugh now.” Wow! Right there, I swore off all humor in my international presentations.
Some of my favorite examples of jargon come from my government contracting days where we had many obscure but concise terms that had sophisticated and verbose meanings. Here are two good examples of jargon that I encountered early in my career.
C-Student’s Revenge. Contractors and consultants use this term to characterize the frustrating experience of dealing with an ignorant client. It is a snarky description of the feelings of some snobby know-it-alls when they have to subordinate themselves to someone with less informed judgment. I have heard many government contractors use this term, as well as general contractors who are getting paid and controlled by clients who know very little about the service or technology they are buying. Notice how C-Student’s Revenge captures well a concept that took me a few sentences to explain. This is the real value of jargon: to create a shortcut word or phrase that has clear meaning within a certain context.
Horse-Apple Pancakes. My second example comes from an old joke. For many written compositions, acceptable quality is an elusive standard. In many team efforts, such as scripts or business proposals, there is sometimes an unwritten team rule that if you critique some piece harshly, you must write a better alternative yourself. Much material starts getting deemed “good enough” because you know that if you criticize it, you must improve it, thereby taking on more work. The term horse-apple pancakes is jargon for “I don’t really like it, but I have nothing better to offer.”
Where did this come from? Here is the old joke that was the source of this beautiful jargon.
Some lumberjacks working a secluded camp in the boondocks had trouble sharing the everyday chores, especially cooking. While they all loved to eat, none of them wanted to do the cooking. They had a cam
p rule that anyone who complained about the food had to take over the cooking immediately. One lumberjack named Fred finally got so fed up with the current cook’s tasteless cuisine that he decided he would enjoy a tour of cooking duty to show his fellow lumberjacks that it could be done well. He stood up and announced: “This food is awful!” The lumberjacks all pointed at him and said, “Your turn, wise guy.”
Fred undertook his new responsibility with pleasure and served up some of the best food they had ever eaten in a lumberjack camp. But after a few months, he started missing the lumber activity, the smell of fresh cut trees, and the male camaraderie in the forest. So he started cooking with less spice, overcooking or undercooking meats, and fixing dishes that he knew some of his buddies hated. After days of half-hearted attempts to get someone to complain, he was staring at the corral thinking of new schemes when one of the horses let loose with a load of horse apples. “That’s it!” he said to himself. He collected a bushel of dried horse apples and mixed them up in pancake batter with just the right consistency. He added fresh blueberries to make the pancakes visually appealing, and served them for breakfast. The lumberjacks dug in enthusiastically. Fred could see their consternation as the flavor sank in and they swallowed hard. Finally, after a few tense moments, the previous cook stood up and stated firmly, “These pancakes taste like crap!” As the other lumberjacks looked at him, he added, “and they’re delicious!”
In the early 1990s, David Burke published three great works on slang and jargon used in America. Street Talk 1, Street Talk 2, and Biz Talk 1 are excellent references for people learning English as a second language and even for native speakers. These books provide insight into just how much our everyday conversation and our business discussions depend to some degree on jargon.
ACRONYMS
The use of acronyms has exploded in the past 30 years as technology has permeated everyone’s life and the jargon of the technical and business worlds has become more commonplace. An acronym uses the first letter(s) of each word in a common string of words to create a pronounceable new word, such as NATO. Nowadays, most abbreviations formed by collecting the first letters of a string of words—whether they are pronounceable or not—are commonly called acronyms: USA, IBM, DVD, ATM, PIN, IRA, BYOB, RSVP. Some words that started out as acronyms are now accepted English words. Here are some that have made it into the dictionary:
scuba
self-contained underwater breathing apparatus
snafu
situation normal, all fouled up (or a different F word)
laser
light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation
radar
radio detection and ranging
sonar
sound navigation and ranging
modem
modulator/demodulator
yuppie
young urban professional
Acronyms have become an important part of many naming efforts within commercial and governmental organizations. If the shortened name of a role, a project, or an initiative suggests a meaningful connotation, it helps people remember the purpose or the identity.
Here are a few useful acronyms.
KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid is a philosophy to promote in everyday activities such as communications, decision-making, and meetings.
ASAP: As Soon As Possible is a good way to ask for something politely even though its normal connotation is damn forceful.
QED: Quod Erat Demonstrandum (Latin) translates roughly as I have proven my point.
WAG: Wild Ass Guess is another common term for a shot in the dark. I am not sure if the root of this saying comes from a wild donkey or from yanking data out of one’s posterior. In any case, the term has many uses.
IMHO: In My Humble Opinion is the most self-contradictory acronym. It is rare to see an authentically humble opinion following IMHO. This acronym is a favorite of people whom you would typically describe using an antonym of humble.
FIGMO: This is a great military acronym I learned at the Air Force Academy. The polite translation is Forget It! Got My Orders. There is no good synonym for this word that I know of. As I learned it, FIGMO is that carefree feeling (with a negative connotation) just before a change in assignment, such as going on leave or getting a new position. If you are feeling FIGMO, you tend to blow things off or expend the absolute minimum effort.
The 50 state postal codes, disguised within everyday English words, are hidden in Puzzle 11. Each word is at least three letters and includes each state’s two-letter postal code sequence. For example, the word far is a three-letter word with the postal code for Arkansas (AR), and scum is a four-letter word with the postal code for South Carolina (SC). Once you have found 47 state postal codes within words, the remaining six disconnected letters in the grid will be the six letters from the three states whose postal code letter sequence cannot be found in an everyday word. Each letter is used in only one of the 47 words, and these words can be found up, down, right, left, or diagonal. There is one seven-letter word, five six-letter words, three five-letter words, eight four-letter words, and 30 three-letter words.
PUZZLE 11. POSTAL ABBREVIATION WORDS
PALINDROMES
A palindrome is a phrase that has the same letter sequence forward and backward. Punctuation and spaces tend to be ignored; only the letter sequences are conserved. Many single words are palindromes, such as a, aa, dad, kook, civic, redder, deified.
Here are some of my favorite multiple-word palindromes.
Gnu dung.
Don’t nod.
Lepers repel.
Is it I? It is I!
Solo gigolos.
Dennis sinned.
Dr. Awkward.
Egad, an adage!
Live not on evil.
Dogma: I am God.
We panic in a pew.
Never odd or even.
Dammit! I’m mad!
Desserts, I stressed!
Do geese see God?
Boston did not sob.
God saw I was dog.
No, it is opposition.
A nut for a jar of tuna.
Too bad: I hid a boot.
He lived as a devil, eh?
Ah, Satan sees Natasha.
No trace; not one carton.
Rats live on no evil star.
Won’t lovers revolt now?
Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?
Was it a car or a cat I saw?
Won’t I panic in a pit now?
Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo.
Go deliver a dare, vile dog!
Able was I, ere I saw Elba.
Madam, in Eden I’m Adam.
Murder for a jar of red rum.
Some men interpret nine memos.
Campus motto: Bottoms up, Mac.
May a moody baby doom a yam?
Kay, a red nude, peeped under a yak.
Go hang a salami; I’m a lasagna hog!
Cigar? Toss it in a can, it is so tragic!
A Toyota! Race fast... safe car: a Toyota
A monkey typed this drivel on the keyboard: “Dra
obye keht nole virdsiht depyt yek noma.”
The last one bends the rules, but it is still a great example of the power of the English language.
OXYMORONS
The word oxymoron is itself an oxymoron. It is derived from the Greek words oxy (meaning sharp) and moros (meaning dull). English is full of seemingly contradictory words that, used together, can make sense in certain contexts. For example, our business is undergoing constant change. Constant change? Constant means not changing. Change means not constant.
Oxymorons are generally useful. Although they appear to be somewhat contradictory, they tend to have meaningful connotations that express a unique aspect of some subject.
Act naturally
Advanced beginner
All alone
Almost exactly
Alone together
Awfully nice
Barely cloth
ed
Boneless ribs
Calm storm
Civil war
Clearly ambiguous
Clearly obfuscating
Climb down
Confirmed rumor
Constant change
Current history
Definite maybe
Deliberately thoughtless
Doing nothing
Drawing a blank
Even odds
Far nearer
Fighting for peace
Final draft
Forward lateral
Found missing
Freezer burn
Fresh frozen
Genuine imitation
Genuine illusion
Good grief
Graduate student
Hardly easy
Holy war
Home office
Icy hot
Idiot savant
Infinite number
Instant classic
A little big
Jumbo shrimp
Liquid gas
Living dead
Mandatory option
Many fewer
Military intelligence
Mindless thought
Natural additives
New and improved
No comment
Now and then
Objective opinion