Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Schnj@estschn~: &says in Honor of John &Francis
picture must be ridiculous or illogical. Take my word for the
fact that if your association is a logical one, you will not
remember it..
To assure that familiar objects will be combined in utterly
fantastic ways, Lorayne specifically recommends (1) imagining the
items out of proportion, (2) picturing the items in violent
action, (3) seeing exaggerated amounts or numbers of items, or
(4) substituting one object for another? For example, if you
need to associate "car1' with "hamburger," you might think of your
own car smashing into a gigantic hamburger (especially if you've
been embarrassed by bumping you car into something and squirm
every time you recall doing so), imagine yourself driving down
the road behind the wheel of a giant hamburger, or picture a busy
street filled with hundreds of honking hamburgers instead of
cars.
Although lllinksll form the foundation of Loraynels system,
much of its real power comes from what he calls "pegs." It is
based on a simple enciphering procedure for numbers. The ten
digits are associated with consonant phonemes of English as shown
in Table 1.
Table 1. Lorayne's Phonemic Cipher for the Decimal Digits
6. sh, tsh, zh, dzh
7. k, g
8. f, v
9- P, b
0. 8,
Vowels, glides, and /h/ don't count; -only the pronunciation of
words are considered, not their spellings.* In accordance with
these rules, every integer is associated with a peg; Lorayne
recommends the pegs shown in Table 2 for one- and two-digit
numbers. The user can choose whatever pegs are most congenial
but should stick to one peg after settling on it. Pegs for
three-digit and longer numbers are easily constructed as needed.
For example, the l2-digit string 633752741631 (which gives the
first Sunday for each month of 1957, the year Lorayne published
his book) can be remembered as "chum mug linger dishmat" (63 37
5274 1631).
Now suppose you have to remember an ordered list of twenty
objects. By forging ridiculous links between the objects and the
pegs for 1 through 20, you can, says Lorayne, easily recall an
object given its number in the list or vice versa; what's more,
the order in which you commit each item to memory doesn't matter.
Linking objects to the peg words rather than directly to numbers
is more reliable because numbers are morphemically longer than
the pegs and lack sufficient individuality to permit memorable
associations with random wordsT: short, semantically heterogene-