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

Schn$$estschn!jf: &sap in Honor of John &Francis
tions between the elements of two sets of speech forms. Each
strategy is better suited to those situations in which the other
is hard to apply.
This complementarity Is Implicit in Loraynets third tech-
nique, which concerns the problem of remembering information that
has no intrinsic meaning for the performer. Lorayne explains
what he means by "meaning1' here with the well-known example of
the lines of the musical staff marked with a treble clef:
The letters, E, G, B, D, and F don't mean a thing. They are just
letters, and difficuJt to remember. The sentence. "Every Good Boy
Does Fine" does have meaning, and is something you know and under-
stand. The new thing, the thing you had to commit to memory was
associated with something you already knew."
Now suppose the performer must associate faces with names. Names
like Baker or Lincoln readily call up a visual image, but many do
not. Loraynets description of how to deal with them is clear
even without the accompanying cartoon illustrations:
No. 3 is Miss Standish. I would select her "bang" hairdo.
You could "see" people standing on the bangs and scratching them-
selves violently because they Itch. Stand itch--Standish. Of
course, a ddsh standing, would serve the same purpose, but I like
an association into which I can inject some sort of action. Now
look at Miss Standish and see the picture you've decided on, in
your mind's eye.
No. 4 is Mr. Smolensky. Don't let the name acare you, it's
easy to find a substitute thought for it. I would see someone
skiing on Mr. Smolensky's very broad nose, and taking pictures
(while skiing) with a small camera (lens). Small lens ski--Smo-
lensky. See how simple it is? I have chosen Mr. Smolensky's
broad nose; you might think that the receding chin is more obvi-
ous. Choose whichever you think is most obvious, and see the
picture of the skier taking pictures with a small lens.=
Notice how both the rational/phonetic' and irrational/visual
techniques play a role here. The "meaningless" proper noun
(typically a single morpheme) is expanded via a phonetic cipher
(punning) into a string of morphemes associated with visualizable
things, which form a memorably absurd constellation linked to the
features of the face in view. True, we increase the number of
morphemes rather than reduce it, as with the "pegs," and impose a
ridiculous image on a real sight rather than see a "crazy" ges-
talt inwardly, as with "links"; still, the same two techniques
are at work.
One application of substitute words that Lorayne recommends
is memorizing foreign-language vocabulary items: you find an
English phrase that "sounds like" the foreign word and visually
linking the word's meaning to the (non)sense of the English
phrase. A good example of this would be "G.1. Japanese" phrases
like "a ring a toe" for ardgat8 'thankyou' and "don't touch your
mustachen for d5 itashfmashite 'you're welcome', accompanied by a
heroic effort to imagine the handing over of ringed toe as a
gesture of gratitude or granting permission to leave the upper