CHAPTER NINE

Rhyming

Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November.

Of twenty-eight is but one,

And all the rest are thirty-one.

Except leap year; that’s the time

When February’s days are twenty-nine.

What child in school doesn’t know this rhyme? Chances are good that you remember it (or some variation of it) from before you started kindergarten, and you probably still use it several times a year to determine the number of days in each month.

Such is the power of rhyming, a mnemonic device that dates back even further than the method of loci, to 800 b.c. Many epic stories, including Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, were written as poems to make it possible for people to remember and share more than fifteen thousand lines of poetry verbally before the advent of paper.

Rhymes, songs, and poetry are popular teaching and learning tools in families, schools, after-school television shows, and the workplace. Simple rhymes have been used to warn children of dangers like poison ivy—”leaves of three, let it be”—and the danger of potential abduction—”stranger danger.” Children learn when to cross the street from a rhyme: “Red means stop, green means go, yellow means everybody stand in a row.” Later, students learn to remember rules of spelling and pronunciation: “When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking.” Chemistry students learn to double-check the labels on bottles in science labs from this rhyme: “Little Willie was a chemist / Little Willie is no more / For what he thought was H2O was H2SO4.” Even adults who struggle with spelling remember, “I before E, except after C, or when it sounds like an A, as in ‘neighbor’ and ‘weigh.’” (Someone who discovered the exception to this rule has since added, “And ‘weird’ is just weird.”)

The power of rhyme doesn’t stop with school, either. Many a farmer may have had the sense to bring in their livestock because of the rhyme, “Red sky at morning, shepherds take warning; red sky at night, shepherds delight.” Electricians remember that “green is ground the world around” to be certain that they know which wire is the grounded one when rewiring an outlet or a fixture. People who might not know how to loosen a screw can recite, “righty tighty, lefty loosey.” And college students use this one as their all-important motto: “Beer before liquor, never sicker; liquor before beer, never fear.”

Rhymes and Music for Permanent Memories

From the moment you learned the alphabet song, you began using rhyme and music as a tool to remember new concepts. Not every song you learned as a child taught a valuable lesson, but they did teach you the value of remembering by setting an idea to music. You jumped rope while chanting rhymes and played clapping games about Miss Susie or Miss Lucy, depending on your region. If you can still sing any of these songs today, you know the remarkable power of music and lyrics.

Think about all the songs that you can sing from memory. Can you count them? There are likely too many to list, because the combination of the rhyming lyric and the established patterns in music create one of the greatest mnemonic devices known to our society. Learning a list of items becomes much easier when you set the list to music. This is the principle used by Sesame Street, Schoolhouse Rock, and a number of other televisions programs for children that help preschoolers and grade school children learn complex concepts. For example, a generation of young people learned how a bill becomes a law by watching Schoolhouse Rock‘s remarkable animated video on the subject, with clever lines like, “Well, it’s a long, long journey to the capital city / It’s a long, long wait while I’m sitting in committee / But I know I’ll be a law someday / At least I hope and pray that I will / But today I am still just a bill.”

Whether it’s Tom Lehrer’s astonishing lyric for “The Elements,” listing the entire table of chemical elements (as of 1959), or the “Fifty Nifty United States” song that lists all fifty American states in alphabetical order, songs have provided catchy, pleasurable, and useful ways to shortcut the memory process. It’s fun and easy to rehearse a song until you commit it to memory, and it can feel effortless to do so.

Why are songs such good memory tools? Songs and rhymes engage more than one part of the brain, creating more and stronger linkages that provide more ways for the brain to retrieve the memory of the information. By using visual and auditory cues, the rhyme or song gets stored in at least two different parts of the brain—and when you add meaning and context to the information through imagery within the rhyme or song, you engage semantic memory. All three of these parts of memory work together to bring that song to your conscious mind quickly and repeatedly.

Henry L. Roediger III, professor of psychology at the Memory Lab at Washington University in Saint Louis, explained this to the Wall Street Journal in a 2013 article. He said that while getting information into memory is relatively easy, recalling it at will can be harder. Music, he said, “provides a rhythm, a rhyme, and often, alliteration. All that structure is the key to unlocking information stored in the brain—with music acting as a cue.”

It’s not the tune but the structure of the song that makes it such a strong mnemonic device. “The added melody encourages repetition and thus memorization, which is perhaps why patients with advanced Alzheimer’s have been known to sing along to a familiar song,” the article concludes.

Making Rhyme Work for You

You don’t have to be a poet laureate to create rhymes or songs that help you remember lists of items, formulas, or facts. Here is a simple process that will help you create your own rhymes.

  1. First, determine what information needs to be remembered. Is it a shopping list? A series of equations or formulas for a chemistry, physics, or math class? The ingredients in a favorite recipe? Rhymes will help you remember lists, facts, or anything else that’s fairly linear or needs to be recalled in order.
  2. Think of short, catchy songs that you can use to create your own rhymes. These can be the tunes to nursery rhymes—”Pop Goes the Weasel,” or “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”—or favorite songs from Broadway shows, movies, television, radio, or any other song that comes easily to mind. You want the tune to come instinctively, so you don’t need to work at remembering it and you can give your attention to the lyric.
  3. See how your information scans with the beat. Look for simple rhymes that are easy to remember.
  4. As with all of the memory tools presented in this book, combining auditory cues with vivid visual imagery will help you remember both the rhyme and its meaning. If your initial information doesn’t provide a good match with a tune, add some imagery that relates to the items you want to remember. One of the most popular examples of this must be “The Philosophers’ Song” created by the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which depicted all of the great philosophers as drunks: “Immanuel Kant was a real pissant / Who was very rarely stable / Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar / Who could think you under the table . . .” and so on. Not only do listeners get a lesson in ways to describe drunkenness, but they also learn names of a wide-reaching history of philosophers.
  5. Once you’ve put together your rhyming song, rehearse it to commit it to memory. You will find that it does not take long before you can recall it all without the use of a lyric sheet.

If you’re not a natural songwriter—or even if you are—there are tools to help you assemble a rhyme that will stay in your memory. Using these over time may keep you from struggling to create a rhyme.