M as in Mancy
LANA
MAWP
Jesus, the helium!
K as in Knowlege G as in Gnome M as in Mnemonic P as in Pterodactyl W as in Wrist
When I was a kid, I was in a clan for Battlefield Vietnam that took itself waaaaay too seriously, had a good number of JROTC kids that insisted we all needed to know this, the NATO phonetic alphabet.
We were using teamspeak, had a session where the group leader stood us all in a line, and one by one wanted us to sound it off.
Guy 1: Alpha!
Guy 2 (me): Bravo!
Guy 3: Catholic!
Group Lead: sighs
shoots Guy 3 in the face
When I worked IT helpdesk I created my own one of these. Others photocopied it, they were photocopied. Years later I dropped in and saw one of the new staff with my phonetic alphabet stuck to the side of his screen. (I think they were also still using my mainframe login ID)
I had a similar thing happen to me. People saw mine, and pretty soon 5-10% of the office had one.
My favorite is asking a call Rep if I can switch to phonetic, and then rattling off the spellings when given the go ahead.
The only reason I have it drilled into my head is because the warehouse I work at uses voice for confirming locations.
The only one I don’t like is Z is for Zulu. I’ve never heard of that word before and it could easily be mistaken for Hulu. Z should be changed to Zebra.
Zulu could have been different, but has “no” (read:minimized) risk of being mistaken for hulu because hulu is not part of the phonetic alphabet. The phonetic alphabet is standardized because it must be, you can find rhymes for any one of these words. No list could be reasonably constructed that wouldn’t. Therefore the only reasonable choice is a standardized list that is designed to not self rhyme.
Zebra is written with S in some languages, so it would potentially cause trouble.
And some say zee brah and some say zeb brah
E for egg isn’t even consistent throughout the English-speaking world. That vowel might be quite different in something like South African or Kiwi English compared to other dialects.
Aigs?
Iggs!
Oh, eyren!
It’s not even consistent within the US. I’ve known people who, if they said that sentence over the phone it would sound a lot like “E as in A”
It doesn’t need to sound the same though, as long as the listener can spell ‘egg’.
True but, for example, a younger me working tech support in the early 2000s would not have known what an ‘igg’ is to even try to spell it.
Anal Colon Anal Butthole
Average Canadian: “Oh yeah, I got this one easy bud!”
Alright, for your final test: how do you spell Quebec?
AC: “Oh, for sure, that one there is easy! It’s, uh… Q, for… uh…”
…
AC: “Q… for… Kay-beck…”
C’est facile non?
When I first started working at a callcenter, I quickly went “oh I need to learn a phonetic alphabet” and printed and posted the NATO alphabet at my desk
We used to do it with everything but the NATO alphabet. Everyone had their own version, I would mostly use first names, some colleagues would do cities, animals, countries, etc etc.
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the 2nd list isn’t great… Chicago and Sugar? N is two words, Mary and Henry are similar… I think part of the NATO one is you’d be able to tell even if you miss part of the word.
Also that the words are accurately pronounceable with a heavy accent. I think there’s an international version that considers more languages here, particularly south-east asian.
I feel like “N as in Nan” could easily sound like “M as in Man.”
Pan, ran, san, ban, can, tan, lan, flan, clan, gran, Dan, fan, van, Jan, there’s probably more…
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As a non-native speaker I’d have no idea how to pronounce or spell Jig, Oboe, Tare or Yoke
Which is exactly why the NATO alphabet is the way it is. NATO is an international organization, and the alphabet is suitable for that.
All the cool kids learned it from the bloodhound gang.
