WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE

A few months back, a puzzle enthusiast asked me: 'What is special about the surname of the first US President? You have to give me the answer I am looking for. It has something to do with the surnames of all his successors.' I confess that it did take me a while, but solve the riddle I did. 

As I do not want to be a spoilsport and deprive you of the exercise your brain needs, I am not giving the answer straightaway. Those who give up can highlight the next few lines and see the answer for themselves.

The answer: The surnames of all the US Presidents have at least one letter in common with the surnames of all his successors. (No big deal, coming to think of it, because hardly a surname can be formed without a vowel and WASHINGTON has three of them. And it hasm to boot, the letters H, N, S and T at least one of which would be present in any surname.)

I was reminded of the puzzle this morning when I chanced upon the sonnet 'Washington Crossing the Delaware' by a little-known poet called David Shulman in 1936. Here is the 14-liner. 

WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE

A hard, howling, tossing, water scene:
Strong tide was washing hero clean.
"How cold!" Weather stings as in anger.
O silent night shows war ace danger!

The cold waters swashing on in rage.
Redcoats warn slow his hint engage.
When general's star action wish'd "Go!"
He saw his ragged continentals row.

Ah, he stands - sailor crew went going,
And so this general watches rowing.
He hastens - Winter again grows cold;
A wet crew gain Hessian stronghold.

George can't lose war with 's hands in;
He's astern—so, go alight, crew, and win!

In this fully metrical and rhyming sonnet, Shulman does paint a vivid picture of the violent waves and the wild wind lashing, but it is not without its faults, purists might argue. The rhyme-scheme is not exactly perfect (the 'anger'-'danger' bit), I agree.  In the second line, it should have been 'the hero'. The contraction in the penultimate line ('s for 'his') is a bit outlandish, to say the least. It is hard to parse lines like 'Redcoats warn slow his hint engage'. There are several points where the construction jars.

Yes, granted, it is not exactly the model verse, but did you notice that every line, like the title, is made up of the same letters as the title of the poem? (A Scrabble player will be quick to notice that the high-value letters - Q, Z, J and X - as well as many of the mid-value letters - K, F, V, Y, B, M and P - and the poor U are missing.)

That was quite a feat, considering that the bard had a self-imposed constraint of 16 letters to work with. And each line had to be an anagram of the title! 

MNEMONICS

A quick quiz for those intimidated by Mathematics. What is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter? Pi, you may say. Numerically, it is 22/7, most may agree. But, it is an irrational number, math whiz kids will protest. For those decimally oriented, the value of Pi translates into 3.14. But that too is an approximation, the sticklers will object. It is a non-recurring decimal. The value of Pi correct to 10 decimal places is 3.1415926536.

Ten-year old Aditya can remember the value of Pi correct to 20 decimal places. Not a great feat, incidentally, considering that the value has been calculated correct to several thousand decimal places. But how does Aditya do this? He just remembers the doggerel:

Sir, I know a rhyme excelling

In sacred truth and rigid spelling

Numerical sprites elucidate

For me the accurate-most amount.

That is an example of a mnemonic: a device, such as a formula or rhyme, used as an aid to remember facts. The classic mnemonic, of course, is the one that goes "30 days hath September, April, June, and November."

Trigonometry is a bugbear for beginners. We all know that Sine, Cosine and Tangent are ratios of two sides of a right-angled triangle, but which is which? Help is at hand: just remember: "The Old Arab Carried A Heavy Sack Of Hay." The initial letters in groups of three represent "Tangent = Opposite / Adjacent; Cosine = Adjacent / Hypotenuse; and Sine = Opposite / Hypotenuse." Can anyone make it simpler than that?

The greatest use of a mnemonic is for remembering the order of things like the planets and the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ. For those who find it hard to remember the BODMAS rule, it is easy if you memorise "Buzz Off, Daisy, Mary And Sarah" and you have "Brackets, Of, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction" in the right order!

It is not as if mnemonics are used only in mathematics. The initial letters of the sentence "My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets" helps you recall the names of the nine planets in the increasing order of their distance from the Sun — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.*

In Biology, the animal kingdom (and the plant kingdom) is divided and subdivided. The hierarchy is not easy to remember, but the sentence "Kids Prefer Cheese Over Fried Green Spinach" comes to our rescue. The initial letters represent the classification: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. A variation is "King Philip Came Over For Good Sleep." Talking of royalty, `King Henry Died Gently Drinking Chocolate Milk' signifies Kilo, Hecta, Deca, Grams (or meters, litres, hertz, watts, bytes or whatever) Deci, Centi and Milli.

The six wives of Henry VIII were Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Kathryn Parr and they all met with different ends. History does not record if he faced any difficulty remembering their names but we have a rhyme to remember their end: 'Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived'!

This rhyme is to remember the names of the twelve disciples of Jesus: "This is the way the disciples run:

Peter, Andrew, James and John,

Phillip and Bartholomew,

Thomas next and Matthew, too.

James the less and Judas the greater;

Simon the zealot and Judas the traitor."

Some mnemonics are quite interesting. The credit-card sized slot found mostly on portable computers for cards such as modems and network interface devices had an incredibly long acronym PCMCIA, which stands for Personal Computer Memory Card International Association. A mouthful, isn't it?

Most of us cannot memorise the acronym, leave alone its expanded version. "People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms" is as good as mnemonics can get!

Orthopaedic doctors might find it useful to remember "Some Lunatics Try Professions That They Can't Handle" for the order of the bones in the wrist: Scaphoid, Lunate, Triquetral, Pisciform, Trapezium, Trapezoid, Capitate, Hamate. Whew! One needs to take a big breath to say all that!
Some people scoff at the attempt people make to remember some `inane-sounding sentence' just to remember something else you already know; but then do they realise the fun they are missing out on?

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*Obviously, this was well before August 2006 when Pluto was demoted.