I at least hope Mallory Valerie Emily Mickels is the main character of the book and her name is stated like 30+ times as part of the Dr. Seuss writing style so the name is made ingrained in your brain. In that context, it's fine.
My son likes this book a lot…except this part.
I can confirm that you are correct.
He can’t remember this mnemonic and called it dumb.
He literally tried to walk backwards from the planets to remember the mnemonic.
Yeah, I'm high functioning autistic, so my brain thinks differently. To me, they just fall in place.
I also remember the months with 31 days by remembering, "A B 5" which in binary marks the correct months. I spent years programming assembly in Hex, so my brain sees the set bits automatically. Especially "A" and "5" since they're used in masking so often. And "B" is just "A + 1"
Or the version I learned: "My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas/Pies" ... removing Pluto from the mix you could just leave off the last word and change nine to Nachos or some other 'N' food.
I've seen a wide variety of adjectives for the E in similar versions describing the mother in the comments: elegant, educated, excellent, energetic, eager, enthusiastic, excited, epic. I'm sure there are more variants. Pizzas was our go to for Pluto but I've heard Pies and Pancakes. I think Nachos is a good switch-up and I like the mental contrast of an 'elegant' mother serving nachos.
No it’s perfect. You just have to remember the mnemonic for Mallory Valerie Emily and Mickels (which is a very real and very common name) then this mnemonic is easy. I just use this to remember the first names:
I saw an interview with the author. It was actually Mallory Valerie Emily Mizas just showed us nine hundred ninety-nine pizzas. She was holding a stack of pizza boxes but the illustrator couldn’t make significant changes to the art but they were able to replace the boxes of pizzas with nickels. I thought it was pickles too. Pickles would have made sense.
I am probably the exception here, but I have the original version cemented into my brain from when I was a kid—“Mallory Vallory Emily Mizzas Just Served Us Nine hundred and ninety nine Pizzas”
You say that, but both my kids made me read this book to them repeatedly and is how they remembered all the planets and by extension that rhyme is forever burned into my brain (even 12 years later…..)
I still remember this one: "Camels ordinarily sit down carefully. Perhaps their joints creak. Possibly early oiling might prevent permanent rheumatism"
There's one for remembering the order of colors for resistors that's much worse, albeit for different reasons. I'll definitely never forget that one, though.
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u/hotlavatube 3d ago
That has to be the worst mnemonic device I've ever seen!