Mental Gymnastics Author:Adam Miller Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. PHONETIC AND HOMOPHONETIC WORDS FOR FIGURES. We commence with the letters of the alphabet which, in their construction, resemble figures, and c... more »an be used for numbers to any desirable extent. Figures, when standing promiscuously represent nothing, only as they are used as numerators of objects, or to express numbers. It is difficult to retain figures in the memory, especially where large numbers are presented, but words and sentences representing figures can easily be retained in the memory. In this way we can place numbers, dates, chronological tables, periods of important events in history, by selecting a familiar word that gives us the desired number. Familiar phrases may be selected to represent any desirable amount of figures, as high as the mind is capable of running them. Several systems have been invented in which letters were used for numbers; but no one has approached so near to a complete system as Prof. Gouraud. With some variations, we adopt his classification of words and articulation sounds corresponding with the different letters to represent figures and numbers. The resemblance between the letters and figures will help the memory to retain them. We select letters from our English alphabet to represent the figures. . 1. 2. 3, 4. 5. 6, 7. 8, 9. z, t, n, m, r, 1, j, k, f, p. The similarity between the figures and the letters may be easily recognized. The first articulation of z is cipher or zero, and represents o. This, with all the other letters representing figures, has the vowel e added to make the articulation complete. Z—or ze, is the first articulation of zero, or cipher o. T—or te, with one single stroke represents - - 1. N—or ne, with two strokes represents - - - 2. M—or me, with three strokes represents - - . 3. R—or...« less