I'm guessing this is autocorrect, but an autocorrect that knows 'pneumonic' (the Firefox spell-checker doesn't!) but not 'mnemonic' seems even less likely than a person who knows the first word but not the second.
Anyway, 'previous' is perhaps less likely to spring to mind than 'back' or 'reverse' or even 'last', each of which would have different mnemonics. ('Last' has a particularly good mnemonic if you keep your hands to the Holy Home Row, which is why vi users, who are most likely to worship at the Altar of the Home Row, can't use it.)
previous is unambiguous. Last is extremely ambiguous. Last = Nth element or current -1? Similar with back or reverse. Previous means N-1 every time. Also it's a pretty commonly used programmer idiom.
I'm guessing this is autocorrect, but an autocorrect that knows 'pneumonic' (the Firefox spell-checker doesn't!) but not 'mnemonic' seems even less likely than a person who knows the first word but not the second.
Anyway, 'previous' is perhaps less likely to spring to mind than 'back' or 'reverse' or even 'last', each of which would have different mnemonics. ('Last' has a particularly good mnemonic if you keep your hands to the Holy Home Row, which is why vi users, who are most likely to worship at the Altar of the Home Row, can't use it.)