Taxonomy mnemonic

Kiss, please, come on, for God's sake!

The one that our highschool teacher told us was:

Kinky People Can Often Find Good Sex

So of course this one sticks in to a teenagers mind.

I learned this as Kings Play Chess On FiberGlass Stools. Not nearly as memorable as kinky sex, it's true, but I managed to get through the midterm anyway.

Oh, and Taxonomy Mnemonic would be an excellent name for a rock band.

I actually learned this from a 10,000 Maniacs song (`Katrina's Fair'). It has a line:

Sylvia keeps beasts in jars
Label them by their kingdom phylum order class
Family
Genus species

You see the problem... Ms Merchant swapped `order' and `class' to get it to scan (in the lyrics sheet it is listed as class order). In any event, I somehow remembered the hierarchy better when it was set to music, even if I had to remember to swap order and class.

Not that that's a mnemonic. How about:

Killer Penguins Crawl On Frozen Glacial Shores
Kirk Punches Chekov On Face, Getting Stares
Kant Provides Crazy Ontology For Graduate Students
Knotted Penises Caress Only Flexible G-Spots

The best mnemonic device for remembering the last six ranks in the three domain taxonomy of life comes from the Comedy Central show TV Funhouse. Though some what vulgar, it is utterly unforgettable. Note that I refer to it as vulgar merely because of the explicit sexual reference, not because of the sexual orientation of said reference. Anyway:

    Phylum           Please
    Class       \\   Come
    Order  ------\\  Over
    Family ------//  For
    Genus       //   Gay
    Species          Sex

If you find you have trouble remembering the first two, domain and kingdom, just think add Don King to the front of that.

The one we were taught in junior high was:
Killer Protists Crawl On Fuzzy Green Slides.
This was sort of recursive (protists), so it's easier to remember. In high school, our biology teacher taught us some variation of the King Philip mnemonic mentioned above.