maxiewawa The personal blog of maxiewawa

Wikipedia As Learning Aid

Technology is a wonderful thing.

Imagine I told you that you had to remember that the bone at the base of your spine, part of your pelvis, was called the sacrum. On top of that, imagine that I had to tell you that the Chinese word for it was 骶骨.

Hard right? Well when I get tricky stuff like that that I have to remember, I just consult Wikipedia.

Type in 骶骨 to Chinese Wikipedia, and you get some helpful info. The 骶骨 is triangular, and there are some pictures of it.

As a native English speaker, I always click on the link on the left that says "English" though.

I then read through the article, getting little bits of info on sacrums. At the end comes something particularly helpful.

The name is derived from the Latin sacer, "sacred", a translation of the Greek hieron (osteon), meaning sacred or strong bone.^[1] Since the sacrum is the seat of the organs of procreation, animal sacrums were offered in sacrifices. In Slavic languages and in German this bone is called the "cross bone".^[2]

That's useful! It helps me remember that it's cross shaped, and even helps me remember the name.

I have to come up with some kind of mneumonic that can help me remember 骶骨 though. In case you didn't know, a mneumonic is a way of remembering some kind of rule.

The first syllable of 骶骨 sounds like "low".... it even has part of the character for "low" in there...

Hmmm... I come up with a picture of a Satanic rite in ancient Germany, where some chieftan is covered in blood. He's just extracted the SACRUM/骶骨 of some poor unsuspecting animal. He takes this cross-shaped bone and laws it on the ground, BELOW a huge bonfire that is raging in front of him. Other pagans are jumping around dancing and singing.