In 1961, the U.S. Navy's electronics technician training used that sentence as a mnemonic device. I was being taught to recognize the ohmic value of a resistor. "Bad" starts with B, stands for Black, and it is zero. "Boys" starts with B, stands for Brown, and it's one. "Rape" starts with R, stands for Red, and it's two. And so on, through Orange (3), Yellow (4), Green (5), Blue (6), Violet (7), Gray (8), and White (9).
Resistors were used in all electronic equipment in those days. Not as much these days, but if you take your smart TV apart, you will still find some resistors in there.
Resistors are made with colored bands painted on them. If you wanted to know how many ohms resistance (impedance to current flow) the thing had, you would look at the color bands. Maybe the bands were Red, Violet, Yellow in that order. Red would be 2, violet 7, yellow was 4. That 4 told you to multiply the 27 (first 2 bands) by 10 to the 4th power. So the resistance was 270,000 ohms, usually written as 270 K ohms or just 270 K.
Clear as mud, right? It didn't take long, though, for the memorization and mental conversion to be second nature. And I still remember it today, largely due to the first sentence above.
But my point is this: The use of that sentence as a mnemonic device in United States military training is incomprehensibile in today's world. It either points to how far we've come, or points to how Neanderthal we were 60 years ago. Or both.
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Update: It also has occurred to me that there was another mnemonic device from my electronics training. To remember the vector relationships of motion, flux, and current (how a generator works, by the way), you would use the right-hand rule* and the phrase "Mary's fuzzy cunt" to remember motion-flux current.
*See https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/physical-processes/magnetism-mcat/a/using-the-right-hand-rule
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