🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov10.023134.30720@news.weeg.uiowa.edu> tlund@news.weeg.uiowa.edu (Thomas Lund) writes:
>GAMES magazine recently had a contest to make "modern" mnemonic devices.  Here
>are the winners ("Tricks for the Memories, GAMES, June, 1992)
>
>Gorbachev's khaki underwera always tends to ride up at long lines exiting
> boring Kremlin Meetings.  = the 15 ex Soviet Republics: Georgia, Hirgizia,
> Ukraine, Armenia, Turkmenia, Tadzhikistan, Russia, Uxbekistan, Azerbajan,
> Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Byerlorussia, Kazakhstan, and Moldavia.
>by Erik Hassing

... and so on.  I think this one will do to illustrate what I want to say.
I wonder how useful it is.  It produces fifteen letters in a certain order
-- the initial letters of the words in the sentence.  Are those fifteen
letters enough to reconstruct the names of the republics?  I doubt it.
Now the order.  It appears arbitrary to me.  (If I'm wrong, I hope
someone will say so.)  If the republics were sorted by area,
population or what have you, so that someone who already knows their
names could use the mnemonic to remember the order, that would be useful.
That is how, say, the jingle for the transistor colour codes works:
you already know the colours, you only need to memorise the order.

-- 
 `Haud yer wheesht!  Come oot o the man an gie him peace.' (The Glasgow Gospel)
Ivan A Derzhanski   (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk;  iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,  Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
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