In my experiense, knowing what the word means makes it easier to remember. When you first start learning, for example, *nix commands, pwd is an acronym for 'print working directory', cd is an acronym for 'change directory' and that's easy to remember. The strange word or acronym is nailed to an explanation in your brain.

The command names make sense, thus making them easy to remember. If you don't know what print means it's hard to use it in the right context. You start wondering "What was that command I had to use to output the variable?" instead of "How do I solve the problem faced?"

My concern is that it doesn't take a little more effort, but rather much more effort, to remember that dsfg should be used rather that print. I think that no one would want to learn a programming language where the syntax didn't make sense.

/brother t0mas