I wonder if you could devise a series of phrases where every consecutive pair of letters in the phrase is a valid two-letter word. Then it might be possible to mentally retrieve the entire list by remembering a handful of phrases, instead of one-per-letter.
This is really quickly scratched together (and there may be bugs), but there don't appear to be that many valid words left completely out when using this strategy against an american dictionary of 3k words. I'll bang on it more later, or someone else feel free to do better]
[Edit: After seeing @msluyter's comment, I adjusted to look for only the American 2-letter words. Ended up with much better results. This list of words (and possibly a subset of them that I'm not checking for yet):
[Edit: Turns out you can get kinda close: https://gist.github.com/1474006
This is really quickly scratched together (and there may be bugs), but there don't appear to be that many valid words left completely out when using this strategy against an american dictionary of 3k words. I'll bang on it more later, or someone else feel free to do better]
[Edit: After seeing @msluyter's comment, I adjusted to look for only the American 2-letter words. Ended up with much better results. This list of words (and possibly a subset of them that I'm not checking for yet):
Covers all but these valid words: