Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Yesterday, in “One Big Happy mnemonics”, the distinction between expression mnenomics and name, or acronymic , mnemonics, providing three spectacular examples of the former for spelling English words: among them, for ARITHMETIC:

 A rat in Tom’s house might eat Tom’s ice cream.

Now, a revisit to my 9/8/10 posting “NICE ‘n’ RICE”, with examples of the latter type.

From that posting:

NICE is the syntactician’s — especially the phrase structure grammarian’s — acronym for (some of) the most salient characteristics of English auxiliary verbs, characteristics that set them apart from main verbs. All in nouns:

Negation (with following not or n’t)
Inversion (in yes-no questions and other constructions)
Contraction (with a preceding word)
Ellipsis (of the complement: VPE)

… RICE — the orthopedists’ acronym for treating sprains and strains. All in verbs:

Rest
Ice
Compress
Elevate

This entry was posted on October 18, 2020 at 1:10 am and is filed under Abbreviation, Memory, Spelling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.