Re: affixes

On 21 Feb 2005, at 12.43 am, Stephen Mulraney wrote:

> Tristan McLeay wrote:
>
>> I've never heard 'My Dear Aunt Sally' before; well, not in reference
>> to
>> maths. I was taught in grade five the more complete 'bodmas'; my
>> sister
>> was taught 'Bomdas' (but 'Bodmas' seems to have been more common;
>
> Bizarre! I was almost going to object vehemently :) to Mark's claim
> that
>
> > In English, we learn the phrase "My Dear Aunt Sally" to remember that
> > Multiplication and Division come before Addition and Subtraction.
Well my first reaction to his claim was that we learn bodmas & such in
Maths, not English---well, maybe briefly to establish the meaning of
the word 'mnemonic', but they expect you to already know it, so it's
not really being taught... ;)

> having never heard of such a thing, and was going to mention this
> "bomdas"
> mneumonic that I heard at school, before deciding that reporting such
> an
> obscure bit of knowledge as a mneumonic used by one teacher in one
> school
> in a little country with a small population, was too trivial even for
> this
> list. I didn't suspect that I was so widespread :-).
Well, who knows, maybe we copied it from Ireland or something (we
copied our pronunciation of the letter H from you guys, apparently (you
used to be able to distinguish Catholics by their pronunciation of the
letter, I hear, but nowadays I expect the division is by region, with
/h&itS/ being the more common amongst the people I talk to), and
'youse', and phrase-final 'but', and the Irish English distinction
between Irish and (Scottish) Gaelic has always been the one I've
used/known/heard (with the Irish English pronunciation of 'Gaelic', no
less, tho changed in line with the Aussie accent). But I doubt it :)

PS: You seem to be confusing mnemonic and pneumonic.

--
Tristan.

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