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It seems mnemonics change as time moves on.  My father, who went to sea age 15 in 1929 when all right-angled triangles were the correct way up, taught me ‘Some people have coal black hair through perpetual brushing’ for calculating trig functions.  B was for for base, and p was for perpendicular.  Therefore, it came as something of a shock during my much later school master days to hear my colleagues muttering on about this weird expression ‘Sohcahtoa’, but that might be because spelling was never my forte.

One that’s been trying my memory for a while is LBW;  ‘Leg before wicket’ in the noble game and ‘late back west’ in practical astro plotting. I have a feeling it was something to do with making corrections to pre-computed astro if for some reason the shot was taken early or late. That is, for every minute of time the shot was taken late, you kept your original hc but moved your assumed position 15’ of longitude (not 15nm) west.   However, the significance of B for ‘back’ escapes me, perhaps because the Vulcan Force used only single Sun shots or two-star sandwich fixes (apart from that once in a career much sought after Sun, Moon, Venus fix). DaveP