Bookkeeper, I always thought the insistance on “Say Again” vs other phrases common to civilian life went back to the issue of similar phonemes lending themselves to confusion, which could be catastrophic in a high stress/noice environment like a firefight. “Repeat,” for example, isn’t all that far from “retreat.” And acting on that perceived order at the wrong time could be catastrophic both for those acting on it, and for those depending on it.
I grant it’s harder to see why “repeat” vs “retreat” is an issue in an engineroom, but I susspect it’s a matter of keeping good comms practices going all through the services.
As an aside, I want to congratulate MsRobyn on a Staff Report well done… and also let the rest of you know that she has now ascended to the glorious status of membership in the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board ! Congrats!!
As an aside, I understand that up until the 19th century or so, French served a similar purpose, being the Lingua Franca for international communication (one of the Horatio Hornblower movies has Lieutenant Hornblower, fluent in French, acting as an interpreter for his commander (Captain Pellew) and a Spanish captain.
On a similar note, when I was in private pilot’s Ground School, we were taught that “Brevity is the Soul of Coherence”. The longer a message is, the higher the certainty that nobody will be able to understand it. I saw this in action when I was working Con Security at A-Kon a few years back, and over the walky talky, at about 3AM, a message came over the radio that rambled on for about a minute and a half, and two beats later, another voice came on with “I have NO idea what you just said.” In general, if you have time to think about what you want to say, go ahead and think about it before you key the mic. Some pilots use cheat sheets where they can fill in all the necessary information (what airport they’re calling into, their heading and altitude, what they want to ask, etc.) to make this easier for them.
Heh, total hijack, but this reminds me of when I was in JROTC in high school. We did a week long summer training which consisted of college ROTC cadets chasing us around making us do pushups and such, and one of the things was we had to not only know the names of the ROTC cadets, but be able to spell their names in the phonetic alphabet on command.
On of the ROTC cadets (called “Tac Officers” for some reason I was never able to divine) was named Berry. We were informed by the other Tac Officers that the proper way to spell her name phonetically was “BRAVO ECHO ROMEO ROMEO WHERE FOR ART THOU YANKEE!” (all caps cause we had to sound off, of course).
We bring you back to your regularly scheduled discussion. cough
This dates back to Morse code days. “R” was (and still is) used as a procedural signal meaning “message recieved” When radiotelephony evolved, radio operators (who would have been proficient in Morse code) used the phonetic for the letter R, hence “rodger”.
Morse proficiency requirements for radio operators are a thing of the past. So it would be fairly humerous if they were using “Romeo” for R, so that they would avoid the mistake of using “Rodger” for R, because, of course, “Rodger” means R!
Incidently, Morse operators will frequently send the R two or three times. Many “copied behind” and needed a little time to finish writing out the last word before focusing thier attention on the reply. When voice came along, this habit got carried along with it, became part of radio tradition, and you will still here the occasional “Rodger, Rodger”…though this has a current usfulness, in that it is not uncommon for the first sylable of a transmission to be lost.
Was reading in the Arizona Daily Star a few months back that some of the A-10 pilots (Davis-Montham AFB in Tucson is a big Warthog base) found, much to their dismay, that they would often lose the first second or two of an incoming radio transmission from Army personnel on the ground. This could be especially problematic since a couple of seconds makes all the difference between “Fire on this position” and “DO NOT fire on this position”.
I’d imagine this kind of thing is where the movie meme of the radio operator saying, at the end of a message “I repeat…” and saying it again (any radio dopers know if that is common IRL?).
It is not uncommon to have the start of radio transmissions clipped. Thoughtful operators key the mic for a second prior to speaking.
I sometimes hear frustrated air traffic controllers trying to get a correct readback of instructions from some clueless clown who doesn’t realise they’re clipping their transmissions.
Roger was also used during wwii when radio communications in the pacific theatre were being intercepted by the Japanese and being retransmitted. Using roger to close communication between posts could identify whether or not the com was genuine. Japanese, radio operators had a particularly difficult time with the “R” sound only able to reproduce a “W” sound instead resulting in the word “Woger”.
Just to be more specific, this was Canadian military practice in the 1970s, so may not be true today or for other users (esp. non-military ones), although I believe we were conforming to a general NATO standard at the time.
One version of the origin of ‘A-OK’, made popular by the astronauts back in the Space Age, is that the astronauts were using voice-activated communications and the fist syllable of whatever was spoken was often cut off. (Or more accurately, the first syllable activated the mic; which couldn’t broadcast the syllable until after it was turned on. And then it was too late.) ‘OK’ might have come out as ‘K’. So the astronauts added an ‘A’ to ‘OK’ to activate the mic.
I don’t know if that’s the actual origin of ‘A-OK’, but I can tell you from using a voice-activated intercom in a Cessna that it would indeed not transmit the first syllable. (I found myself starting sentences with ‘Uh…’ a lot. I prefer the PTT used in the helicopters.)
During my military training, I was taught that you never say Roger Wilco, as Wilco implies that you understood the transmission and that you would comply.