Re: [HAPS-L] Cranial nerves and memes

[Judith Gibber <jrg43@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 4 Jul 2007, Ken Saladin wrote:

> I find it sad, though, that so many health-science students AND 
> INSTRUCTORS call such memory aids "pneumonics," as if they were some 
> sort of lung disease. I've seen them called that right here on HAPS-L. 
> If that's the right word for them, it's pneus to me!


It implies that one knows how to spell pneumonia and remembers that 
mnemonic starts with a silent consonant, so it's an understandable error.

It also makes it easier to understand why it's sometimes so difficult to 
trace the etymology of words - there were probably even more variations in 
spelling in previous generations. Imagine the revised edition of Carey's 
book in the year 3000:

PNEUMONIC - relating to the lungs. Ancient Americans used this term to 
refer to methods used to aid memory in the days before IMCs (implantable 
memory chips), apparently because they believed that there was a close 
association between memory and the respiratory system. It was feared that 
poor memory might actually inhibit breathing, and the mentally ill were 
cajoled into remembering things in order to keep breathing.  The phrase 
"Remember to breathe" is found one extant text, The Complete Idiot's Guide 
to T'ai Chi (a variant of Teaching). Similarly, memory loss was thought to 
be related to respiratory loss.  We see this in another text, where, when 
asked to recall events of 20 years earlier, instead of saying "I can't 
remember", one American expressed this as "I didn't inhale."
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