Just in case you’re serious … the whole and entire point is that “ghoti” for G is misleading as all get out.
When I was a little kid my Dad told a story of a cow-orker whose last name was something like “Farmer”. Mr. Farmer liked to introduce himself as “That’s F as in Philadelphia, A as in …”
I have no idea why that’s stuck with me all these decades, but it has.
There was an episode of Monk in which one of the running gags was Randy Disher using idiosyncratic words to stand for letters, where the words were terrible fits. I think one was “T as in tsunami” and another was “G as in gnome”.
What I find to be annoying is people who spell the way OP said - “A as in Alpha” (or even “A - Alpha”) Maybe its just that I’m used to speaking on a radio to someone else who uses the system all the time. Delta, Oscar, Papa, Echo is the correct way to spell it using the NATO alphabet. I suppose the other ways are acceptable for non-frequent users but it still bugs me.
Correct, but odd, since “alfa” isn’t even a word. Not even in the Italian car company name “Alfa Romeo”, where “alfa” is just an initialism for “Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili”. It’s a mystery why “alfa” came to be the conventional spelling in the NATO/ICAO phonetic alphabet.
No mystery. It’s to clarify the pronunciation for those members of NATO whose language doesn’t have a “ph = f” combo in it. There are more than a few.
Good point, thank you. Internationalization was a major goal of the NATO phonetic alphabet.
I’ve tried to use the NATO alphabet directly, when spelling things like my name over the phone (“Charlie Hotel Romeo Oscar November Oscar Sierra”), but I’ve found that it usually just confuses the person on the other end. So now I usually do the “C as in Charlie” thing, unless I have reason to suspect that the person I’m talking to is a veteran or a ham (or would otherwise know the NATO alphabet).
A lot of times, me spelling my name ends up being
“V” - as in Victor
NO, I said “V” as in Victor
V AS IN VIOLENT
(by then, they get it)