Rhyme Time

 ~  In the Land of the Blind, the Man with the Eye Patch is a Pirate.  ~

                We remember rhymes.  We remember rhyming phrases much more easily than we do anything that doesn’t rhyme.  Why do you think that parents have used nursery rhymes instead of free verse to teach their children valuable life lessons for eons?  Think about it (and you WILL think about it because even now, all these years later, you remember nursery rhymes, and not just the really sick and sadistic ones, which is to say most of them).  We retain rhymes.  That’s why you can’t get that stupid Lady Gaga song out of your head.  That’s why it’s easier to recall the fate of Humpty Dumpty than your wife’s birthday.  And Mr. Dumpty was just an egg with legs who died tragically and, without the aid of modern Eggman medicine, was subjected to both royal men and royal horse attempts at piecing him back together to make him live again, like some sort of medieval Frankenstein monster omelet.  You’ve celebrated your wife’s birthday for years (if you hadn’t, she probably wouldn’t still be YOUR wife), and yet it’s simpler to remember a silly tale you learned decades ago, when all that really mattered to you was finding your next sugar fix, than it is to remember the date of birth of the person you sleep next to every night.  That’s crazy, but, much like getting caught between the moon and New York City, it’s also true (and I only remember that because it’s a song and most of them rhyme). 

                Apparently, rhyming increases memory processing.  So, it’s not that you really care about Humpty Dumpty or Digital Underground (the guys who sang “The Humpty Dance”).  It’s just that rhyming phrases and stories are more easily moved from one part of our brains to another, the part that crystallizes and allows for later recollection.  Politicians and preachers have known this for years.  That’s why people liked Ike, well that and his winning World War II.   I can remember his political slogan even though I wasn’t born until fifteen years after Ike was out of office.  That’s why evangelical black preachers are better than stoic white preachers.  That’s why I can’t recall anything that any preacher I heard in childhood said in the pulpit, but I can remember song lyrics to vaguely Satanic 80’s hair bands.  It’s not that I prefer the devil.  He’s just got better writers.  That’s why the only thing I remember from the O.J. Simpson trial of almost twenty years ago is his lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, saying “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”  That’s why I can remember William Henry Harrison’s winning 1840 presidential campaign slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” who ran for office 135 years before I was born, but only two presidential campaign slogans from MY OWN lifetime.  I didn’t even remember what Tippecanoe referred to until I looked it up so that I could write about it here (Harrison put down a Shawnee Indian uprising, killing 900 American Indians in Tippecanoe, Indiana in 1811.  It’s hard to believe that American presidents used to brag about how many dudes they’d killed and then taunt their opponent for only killing nine or ten Indians.  It’s not hard to believe that killing makes good politics, but making a rhyming slogan out of it?  Come on, mid-18th century America.  That’s pretty harsh, even for you.).  Christian Sunday school lessons are sometimes taught in rhyme.  Those are the ones you remember.  Rabbis have been using song to teach the Torah for five thousand years.  I’m sure that there’s a Hindu equivalent.  

                Some treasured children’s books stick with us because they were written in verse.  Dr. Seuss knew that.  That’s why The Cat was wearing a hat and not a baseball cap, a beret, a World War I pointy Prussian helmet or a Tam o' Shanter.  It’s not just children’s books written in verse that stick with us.  I remember little cutesy rhyming slogans my mother said when I was little.  That’s why whenever I cover myself up with blankets on a cold night I can’t help but tell myself silently that I’m “Snug as a Bug in a Rug” and not just be happy that I’m warm.  I HAVE to rhyme it. 

                We should really think about using the knowledge that our brains process rhymes more easily in order to memorize actual useful information.  I won’t forget that “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”  Only later did I learn that he was a con artist who, on his last voyage to The New World, killed so many native Caribbean Indians that even Spanish royalty, not a group known for their love of all the people of the world, said, “Whoa there, Chris.  Thanks for doubling the size of the world, but we’re going to have to stop paying for your little murder spree Spring Breaks.”  All that I remember is the rhyme and this is the guy who knew the guy for whom my own country gets its name.  But do I recall that fact?  No.  All I remember is the rhyme.  We COULD, however, insert fuller stories into our children’s historical rhyming poems.  It could go, “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.  With a whack whack here and a whack whack there, he brutally massacred so many Indians that Ferd and Isabella said ‘No fair.’”  We’re probably not GOING to use that one, but we could. 

                We could, theoretically, use rhyming verse to teach anything.  I’d love to hear med students using this technique to learn their stuff.  “If a patient presents with urine of grey, then wish him a Happy Chlamydia Day.”  “If ye have nigh been on land for a long, long time, then it’s scurvy ye got and so eat ye a lime.”  I don’t know why I wrote that one in pirate-speak.  I don’t think most medical students talk pirate.  Maybe they do.  I can’t say for sure that they don’t.  There must be a pirate medical school somewhere.

                A lot of people have trouble remembering other people’s names.  I’ve heard it said that using a rhyming word association helps when you first meet someone.  We could teach our children to do this.  “I just met a girl named Mary.  She has two gigantic facial moles.  No one wants to look directly at it,  So everyone talks to her nose holes.” Or, “I just met a girl named Rachel.  Her breasts are as big as eighteen-wheeler tires.  No one talks to Rachel’s face, and her bra has extra wires.”  I wouldn’t advise you to repeat this rhyme TO Mary, or Rachel, but it would help you recall their names the next time you run into them.  If you make the memory trick both dirty AND rhyming, you’ll definitely remember the person’s name. 

                This is a real phenomenon.  It’s something simple that we can use to make the world a more well-informed place.  It’s a trick we can employ to learn anything: quadratic equations, historical data, what our dogs are allergic to, the proper way to mix a margarita, which people we like and why, which people we don’t like and why, the name of the cute girl at the check-out counter at Publix, the order of the planets in our solar system from Mercury to Pluto (It’s still a planet.  I don’t care what they say.), which flavor of ice cream is your nephew’s favorite, or the name of the founder of Scientology was and why we should make fun of him.  Actually, that one’s pretty easy to remember, even without a rhyme.