23 August 2006

Mourning Pluto's banishment- a perfectly good mnemonic ruined

When I first started writing this post, there was talk of there possibly being 12 planets. I was against this idea, b/c it would totally throw off the ingenious mnemonic that generations of us learned our planets with:
My very educated mother just showed us nine planets.

I mean, how could you beat that in terms of a clever mnemonic? What do you do with the three extra planets?

But then I read this op-ed in the NYT (which you may not be able to read if you don't have access to Times Select--in which case, read it here.), and I was relieved.

The op-ed author proposes this silly mnemonic:
"my very energetic mother just served us nine pizzas, sans xenophobia"
which makes no sense whatsoever, but I was ready to accept this as a perfectly legitimate mnemonic. After all, how can you reject a non-xenophobic pizza (although it is unclear whether she is serving sans xenophobia, or whether the pizza comes without xenophobia. Of course, it could be that the energetic mother is without xenophobia, in which case, the grammatically correct way to rephrase this is: my very energetic mother, sans xenophobia, just served us nine pizzas. But we are kindof constrained by the order of the planets and thus must throw out any notion of grammatical scruples out the window. Alas.) ? Though this one only accounts for the possibility of 11 total.

Just when I convinced myself that I could live with this slightly bastardized version of the original mnemonic, I found out the very next day that Pluto is no longer a planet. Now, I know that the planetary commission has better things to do than to take mnemonics into consideration when voting on whether or not something is a planet, but this is just wrong.

So now we have neither non-xenophobic pizzas or nine planets, but:

My very educated mother just showed us nine

Nine what? You can't just leave us hanging.

My very educated mother just showed us nothing.

Ok, that completes the sentence, but that's so anticlimactic, and not nearly as thrilling as non-xenophobic pizzas or nine planets. I mean, what's the point of having a very educated mother, if she isn't going to show you anything?


My very esoteric mnemonic--just skewered, undid, (and) negated.

My very educational mnemonic just showed up nonchalantly.

Ok, does anyone have a better mnemonic sans pluto?

8/29 update:
So I posed an email query, and the best one so far (though it is off by one letter):
Mean vitriolic educated mother just shit-canned (o)ur ninth.
Thanks to Betsylan for this clever one!





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