Phonetic alphabet
I have been a fan of the NATO phonetic alphabet (words for letters eg. Charlie for C) since my father taught it to me as a child. My father is the least military man to ever spend 22 years as a career army officer (1). Though he didn’t t like shining his shoes he could still recognize a superior method when he saw it, and passed it along to me.
The military has always cared about clear, and concise communication. In the heat of battle over a crackly radio, you might want to ask for things to be spelled out when you are ordered to take 12 men and go eat (2). Up until WWII each army had it’s own phonetic alphabet based on the language and dialects of their country. The US used the able-baker alphabet which is why E company in the HBO mini series “Band of Brothers” was EASY company.
Following WWII with the formation of NATO it became more important for joint forces from different countries to communicate with each other. Many national phonetic alphabets contained words that could confuse non native speakers. The British phonetic alphabet for instance was composed entirely of words that for some reason sounded dirty (3). After a little bit of searching, NATO borrowed the phonetic alphabet that civil aviation was using for radio communications. It contained words that were distinct from each other, and easily recognizable to speakers of English, French and Spanish.
Earlier in my career I worked doing technical support for field engineers. Since they were often on cell phones, and I was giving them authorization codes or obscure UNIX commands I found the NATO phonetic alphabet to be very useful. It is easy to understand, and has so much more dignity than yelling into a phone that the serial number is SIXER DASH YETI YETI NUTCASE. Recently I had the worst and longest tech support call in history. The reps only training was clearly a 3rd generation Xerox of the manual, and worst of all when they had to spell something out over our scratchy line to Bangalore, they used the dumbest words possible. K as in knew? I figured that they must want to provide bad support if they have this person manning the phones. And if you are going to do something badly why not make a huge mess of it? Thus I was inspired to create the worlds worst phonetic alphabet.
Please print this up and keep it in you wallet. Next time you are on your cell phone trying to tell someone the street name of the restaurant where you are meeting, use this, the worst phonetic alphabet. It is a delightful collection of obscure, easily misunderstood and sound alike words. Enjoy
aye
beau
catsup
dough
eponymous
faze
gnome
heir
isle
Juan
ketchup
lap
Mancy
Nancy
opossum
pnumonia
quiche
rap
scent
tsunami
umbrage
via
wrap
Xioping
yew
zap
(1) He actually had a commanding officer tell him, “Coppenrath there isn’t a single military bone in your whole body”.
(2) Go where? Go EAST! – ECHO ALPHA SIERRA TANGO.
(3) The ARSE-BARMY alphabet
