You can use a rhyming system of mnemonics by Lewis Carroll, author of the immortal "Alice" books and much nonsense poetry, to remember dates, phone numbers, and other numeric data.
In the 1870s, Lewis Carroll devised a mnemonic system for numbers that he called the Memoria Technica, after an earlier system. Carroll's system is little remembered by us postmoderns. Like today's more common Major System [Hack #5], it relies on converting numbers into consonants and filling them with vowels to make words; unlike the Major System, it uses rhyming couplets to help you remember the words that are created, instead of simply having you remember them "naked," and in this sense it is an advance on the former.
Tip
If you already know the Major System consonants, you could probably substitute them for Carroll's without too much trouble.
First, you need to memorize the number-to-consonant conversions shown in Table 1-5, which provides mnemonics for remembering the mnemonics.
Table 1-5. Number-to-consonant conversions
Tip
Carroll said his intent was to provide one common and one uncommon consonant for each number. He was a polyglot, so many of the metamnemonics involve number words in other languages; however, the only one that really doesn't make any sense is J for 3. Carroll said it was the only consonant left after he filled in the rest of the table.
The next step is to convert the numbers you are trying to remember to a word or words and to make them the last part of a rhyming couplet. Carroll gives the following example to remember 1492, the year Columbus first came to America.
First, drop the 1 from 1492; it's obvious Columbus didn't sail in 492 or 2492.
Next, convert 492 to a word using either of the pair of letters associated with each digit, like this:
As it happens, the letters in the second row (FND) will form the word found nicely, but some other combination might have been used, such as QND for queened (as in "The pawn was queened when it reached the eighth row").
Carroll writes:
The poetic faculty must now be brought into play, and the following couplet will soon be evolved:â
"Columbus sailed the world around,
Until America was F O U N D."1
Presto! Convert FOUND back to FND by extracting the vowels; then convert that to 492, and you have it.
Carroll makes remembering numbers with rhyming couplets seem as easy as falling off a bicycle (they say you never forget how). But Carroll was an Oxford don, a mathematician, and a gifted poet. How easy is it for us to "bring our poetic faculties into play?"
I will now demonstrate the use of the method to remember the phone numbers of Powell's City of Books in Portland, Oregon (my favorite bookstore; visit it if you get a chance) and the Seattle branch of Ikea (where I do have to go periodically).
The phone number for Powell's City of Books is (800) 878-7323. We'll drop the toll-free 800 area code as being obvious, just as Carroll did with the 1 in 1492. That leaves 878-7323. Using the mnemonics shown in Table 1-5, we can convert the phone number to letters, like this:
From these pairs of letters, we choose seven consonants that can form words:
H M K M T W T
And then the words themselves:
HAMMOCK MY TWIT
Note that I'm treating MM as a single 7 and CK as just K. I learned this consonant-melding trick from the Major System [Hack #5]; Carroll doesn't mention it. If you really do have a number with a double digit, such as 77 (MM), in it, either put a vowel between the consonants you use (as with MOM) or use two separate consonants (such as MP, as in lump).
Also, note that I had half an idea of what the final rhyme would look like when I selected the letters; as soon as I saw HMK, I thought of myself coming home from Powell's with an armload of books and lying down in a hammock to read them. The final result?
| Arms full of books, but you don't mind a bit? |
| Lie down and read in the HAMMOCK, MY TWIT! |
Now, for the Ikea Seattle store, whose phone number is (425) 656-2980. Again, I can omit the area code, because I know where the store is and what its area code is likely to be. That leaves me with 656-2980. Again, using the mnemonics shown in Table 1-5, we can convert to letters, as shown here:
From these pairs of letters, I select:
S V S W N K R
SAVES A WANKER
I thought about rhyming wanker with tanker, anchor, and Angkorâall suggestive of the global reach of Inter IKEA Systems BVâbut all the couplets I came up with were too long. Eventually, though, I devised this ditty:
| Look at all the cash and rancor |
| That Ikea SAVES A WANKER! |
Rude, eh? Don't worry; that makes it easier to remember.
Neither of these two rhymes took longer than a few minutes to create. However, they have stuck in my memory, suggesting that you use this method for data that's important to you, that you want to retain, and that you don't mind spending a little time learning. Carroll himself used his system to remember dates associated with various Oxford colleges, among other things; he would trot out the dates when showing guests around Oxford. Apparently, he used it to memorize logarithms as well.
A similar principle is at work in the mnemonic parody technique [Hack #10], which you can use to remember many more kinds of information than numbers.
Collingwood, Stuart Dodgson. The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll. Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/1/4/8/11483/11483-h/11483-h.htm . (This biography by his nephew includes Memoria Technica material in Chapter 7.)
Facsimile of a handwritten Memoria Technica monograph by Carroll (http://electricpen.org/CarrollMemoriaTechnica1.jpg).
Takahashi, Hisako. "Memoria Technica JaponicaâA Study of Mnemonics" (http://users.lk.net/~stepanov/mnemo/takahae.html).
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