Polyglot Memory

When you know many languages, you can use one to remember facts in another.

There are these shortcuts you create to remember certain things for exams. The funny thing is that the shortcut remains with you but the real thing you had to learn fades away. In the polyglot world, you take advantage of every single language you know to create these shortcuts.

One of those shortcuts I remember is a set of states in the US. The shortcut was - ‘Aiyyo, Arjuna Kollaranda Nee Vaada’. Which in Tamil translates to Oh Arjuna! He is killing me, please come.

It was a shortcut to remember the names of Ohio, Arizona, Colorado and Nevada. I remember the shortcut did not include one state, the only one I had to remember.

This weekend for some reason those set of words popped back into my head and I just needed to know what I was trying to memorise!

I went back and searched and searched and it turns out that the River Colorado flows through Colorado, Utah, Nevada and Arizona. I am certain I did not add Ohio without reason but it is in no way contiguously connected to any of these states and I am certain that I was learning this for my geography test.

Source: Wikipedia

Say my memory is deceiving me and ‘Aiyyo’ was meant to denote some other state, the only other state in the vicinity that can jive with that shortcut is Idaho.  But Idaho does not have any river system that connects with the south.

Alternately the Rocky Mountains run from down all these states but they also include Wyoming, Montana, Utah and New Mexico

Source: Wikipedia

So I have no idea what I was mugging up. But at least you got schooled in the geography of the western United States.