Yesterday, we were discussing the sadness of the demise of Pluto as a planet (yes, we do discuss such things), and a mnemonic that is used to remember the names of the planets in their proper order came up, to wit:
Many Very Earnest Men Just Sit Under Neighbors’ Porches
This is a trick that I must confess I have not used before, revealing the tragedy of a deprived childhood. However it proved interesting anyway because, once we removed the offending now non-planet from the memory crutch we ended up with:
Many Very Earnest Men Just Sit Under Neighbors
which seems on the surface to be vaguely obscene.
To be fair, I must admit that the above gag has to be credited to the other half of our duo, myself having trouble just remembering it in the first place much less being able to come up with it. In fact, in order to remember the memory trick for this blog I had to go through the planets themselves to fetch the first letters of their names and thus restore the mnemonic to its own proper order.
The life of a nerd is not always easy.