My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos (planet mnemonic)

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 9/5/06, Steve Kl. <stevekl at panix.com> wrote:
> in trig class in high school, I concocted "Seventy Cold Tenors of Hawaii
> Are Having Operatic Arias" to get my trig fucntions right, writing S C T
> down one column, and the remainder of the initials, two at a time, in the
> right to give
>
> S(ine) = Opposite (over)
>         Hypotenuse
>
> C(osine) = Adjacent (over)
>         Hypotenuse
>
> T(angent) = Opposite (over)
>         Adjacent
>
> Ridiculous, but I remember this some 25 years later.
>
> I also devised "the King of Poland Cannot Order French Grapes on Sunday"
>
> for Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.
>
> I was really big on mnemonics.

Twenty years after high school biology class, I still remember this
handy mnemonic I came up with for embryonic development:

Zbigniew Brzezinski Goosed Ella Fitzgerald
(Zygote, Blastula, Gastrula, Embryo, Fetus)


--Ben Zimmer

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