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A Musical Mnemonic
I have always loved mnemonics. One of the first I remember as a child helped me spell the word ‘because’:
🐘 Big Elephants Can Always Understand Small Elephants = because
Then there was this one for ‘rhythm’:
🥁 Rhythm Has Your Two Hips Moving = rhythm
But the most ingenious mnemonic of all comes from my musical days. Like all Western music students, I had to learn the order of the sharps and flats as follows:
The order of the sharps: F#, C#, G#, D#, A#, E#, B#
The order of the flats: B♭, E♭, A♭, D♭, G♭, C♭, F♭
Notice how the order of the sharps is the mirror image of the order of the flats. In other words, they are palindromic:
(Sharps) F, C, G, D, A, E, B B, E, A, D, G, C, F (Flats)
To remember this order, my piano teacher taught me a simple sentence that reads both forwards and backwards:
To remember the order of the sharps:
Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle
To remember the order of the flats:
Battle Ends And Down Goes Charles’ Father
I wonder who came up with that and how long it took them to do so!
This piano arrangement of Pop Goes the Weasel has
three sharps and is in the key of A major
Fronting
The palindromic sentence is made possible, partly as a result of fronting.
Fronting is a stylistic device often used in storytelling, where a word or phrase that would typically come later in a sentence is moved to the beginning.
- Without fronting: Father Charles Goes Down
- With fronting: Down Goes Father Charles
In this case, the usual order of Goes Down is reversed to Down Goes. However, fronting doesn't always cause a reversal of word order, as you can see in the following examples:
1. From the nursery rhyme Pop Goes the Weasel:
‘Pop goes the weasel’
(Not: ‘The weasel goes pop’)
2. From the book The Hobbit:
‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’
(Not: ‘A hobbit lived in a hole in the ground.’)
3. From the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar:
‘In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf.’
(Not: ‘A little egg lay on a leaf in the light of the moon.’)
Why use fronting?
Fronting gives us control over the order in which people, things, and actions are presented, allowing us to guide how they are visualised when reading or listening to a story.
Consider the following introductory line of a story I wrote titled 'All is not well at the beach':
"All is not well at the beach
Lying on the sand is
The skeleton of a turtle"
Now compare how this would read without fronting:
"All is not well at the beach
There is the skeleton of a turtle lying on the sand"
In this case, fronting allows me to mention the most important component of the sentence – the skeleton of a turtle – last. This creates a more dramatic, suspenseful and heightened experience for the reader or listener.
To put it another way, in The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr writes:
“Because writers are, in effect, generating neural movies in the minds of their readers, they should privilege word order that’s filmic, imagining how their reader’s neural camera will alight upon each component of a sentence.”
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Thank you for reading 🤗
Jamie
