Mind Your Memory

Mnemosyne was the Greek goddess of memory, Her namesake, mnemonics, simply means "memory aid".
Mnemonics can be anything that helps a person to remember but here we will use the word "mnemonics" to refer to acronyms, rhymes or patterns used to remember pieces of information.

Almost everyone will know at least one mnemonic. Common ones include:
righty tighty, lefty loosey
to remember which way to tighten a screw.

when the mites go up the tights come down
stalagmites and stalactites

ROY G. BIV or Richard of York gave battle in vain
for the colours of the rainbow
Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Indigo
Violet

CSS trouble
When adding padding or margins to a CSS property the dimensions are in the order of
Top
Right
Bottom
Left

My german teacher used some mnemonics to help us remember when a conjunction changed the case of an object.
These all take the dative case.
BAGZVSNAMES
Bei
Aus
Gegenuber
Zu
Von
Seit
Nach
Ausser
Entlang
Seitdem

Mnemonics are also very commonly used by medical students to remember the large amounts of information required in medical training.
Second letter rule for inversion/eversion:
· Eversion muscles:
perineus longus
perineus brevis
perineus terius
· Inversion muscles:
tibialis anterior
tibialis posterior

While they can aid memory it is quite difficult to create effective mnemonics using acronyms because the information you're trying to recall is only vaguely related to the mnemonic itself.

For example, this was taken from www.medicalmnemonics.com
Intrinsic muscles of hand (palmar surface)
"A OF A OF A":
· Thenar, lateral to medial:
Abductor pollicis longus
Opponens pollicis
Flexor pollicis brevis
Adductor pollicis.
· Hypothenar, lateral to medial:
Opponens digiti minimi
Flexor digiti minimi
Abductor digiti minimi

The "A"'s are meant to remind the student of three different phrases, each of them quite difficult. Two of the muscles of the hand are not included in the mnemonic. There are certainly better mnemonics of this kind but it does not seem to be an ideal method of remembering.

What's needed are more general solutions which allow the easy creation of linked pieces of information that can be used in a number of applications.