“Today mnemonics is not thought of as anything more practical than a memory device for remembering ingredients, lists, and in some cases formulas. Virtually all the sciences depend upon mnemonics, typically in the form of sentences or phrases in which the first letter of each word stands for a different item or procedure— or even in the form of a single word whose letters stand for different components. Chemistry, for example, produces mnemonics by the gross. Some are rather clever, such as the one for organic chemistry’s sequence of dicarboxylic acids: oxalic, malonic, succinic, glutaric, adipic, pimelic, suberic, azelaic, and sebacic. If you capitalize the first letter of each word and are clever enough, you can come up with ‘Oh My, Such Good Apple Pie, Sweet As Sugar.’ That’s the mnemonic.

And that is all that speech is, a mnemonic system— one that has enabled Homo sapiens to take control of the entire world. It is language, and only language and its mnemonics, that creates memory as Homo sapiens experiences it.”