Stalagmites might reach the roof one day.
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You know, they all seem to have the “tite” and the “mite” sorted out, but they leave it there.
I wonder if we could revolutionize the field by coming up with something that addresses the “lac” vs “lag” part too.
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Shit! I misspeled one of 'em!
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The “c” in lac is for ceiling, the “g” in lag is for ground?
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Good so far! Now to make it all into one slick mnemonic…
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That’s a linguistic thing. Both derive from Greek σταλάσσειν “to drip”, and one is the past active nominative: “thing which dripped” with the ending -akta, the other is the past passive “thing which has been dripped” -agma. The past bit is encoded in the velar stop, and whether it’s voiced or not is affected by the following consonant. “T” is unvoiced, so you get “-actite”, with the Latinate suffix “-ite” added as well, and “m” is voiced, so you get “-agmite”.
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Thank you! That satisfies my curiosity 
I had looked it up to see if the difference would be in their roots but all I saw was that they came from the same root word, so that didn’t help me much. You are, as usual, a wonderful font of information.
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Not a mnemonic, but remember if you have ants in your pants then…
…the mites go up and the tights come down.
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Creating a column. That’s easy to remember because…
We were taught: stalactites - t for top
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Sitting by every abandoned phone in a derelict government building.
Sometimes I am thankful for my job.
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These are all great! Just gotta make sure I save them all in my bio-computer’s hard drive!
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I always remember it using the ‘c’ and ‘g’ characters: stalaCtites are on the ceiling, stalaGmites are on the ground.
ETA: for @OhHai
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Well, i’ve always remembered it as stalactites drop from the ceiling since one drops their tights. 
Silly, i guess, but it works.
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Who knew that caves had so many tight-dropping people in them. Should I get back into spelunking?
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