Transcript of “January Mnemonic Updated”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. If you are now trudging through the bleak midwinter, I have a poem for you. It’s called Mnemonic.
Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November. Unless a leap year is its fate, February hath 28. All the rest hath three days more, except in January, which hath 6,184.
How true is that? That’s by Brian Bilston, who has hundreds of thousands of followers on social media because he’s incredibly prolific and he writes a lot of witty poems like that. And that’s from his new book called Days Like These.
Oh, yeah, I follow him on social media as well, mainly because his stuff is such an uplift every time I see it. He’s the poet in the Shel Silverstein model where there’s multiple layers. There’s the funny layer. There’s the thoughtful layer. And then there’s like, how did he do that layer?
Right, right. That’s a great way to describe it. Yeah, they sneak up on you sometimes.
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