Mnemonics from the Golden Age of Memorization

Abstract

When I was a high school student in the mid-forties, the alpha and omega of all pedagogical principles was memorization. I recall the no-nonsense motto of our practically pictureless first-year Latin text: Repetitio est mater studiorum. The only teacher to swim against the tide in my school, a diocesan minor seminary long on Tridentine rigor and short on academic mercy, was an Augustinian monk named Adolf Trapp. A refugee from Nazi Germany and a renowned medievalist who spoke eight languages and could work in twelve, Father Trapp was assigned to teaching beginner's German in the New World. Luckily for us, he was also a person of compassion, constantly seeking ways to lighten our load without sacrificing the integrity of his subject. He devised all sorts of mnemonics. A few of his instructional devices have stayed with me, even though I had no intention in those days of becoming a teacher of German. They have been part of my pedagogical repertory for more than a quarter of a century. Apart from an occasional embellishment which has crept in over the years and which I am no longer able to sort out, I present these memory aids as he gave them to my classmates and me. Father Trapp's approach to the intricacies of German sentence structure points up his gift for making complicated things seem somewhat simpler and therefore less awesome. He began by telling us in mock seriousness that even if the Germans won a war, theirs could never become the international language because of its strict adherence to a very peculiar set of rules for determining word order-unless of course, his formulae for the memorization of these rules were adopted: