Learned the NATO alphabet for one once, so that’s what I use.
Well, the Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera was a popular car for many years.
This sort of came up during a phone call last week. I was reading back a part number and said, ‘S as in sierra.’ The guy on the other end paused and said he would have guessed Ciara.
“Mancy”? I don’t know if that’s a common word where you’re from, but I’ve never heard of it. If I heard you say that, I’d write down “N”.
Which is exactly the sort of thing I’d like to avoid. But it’s a lot of mental work, for each and every letter, to stop to think if there are any soundalikes that start with different letters. The sensible thing to do is to do that once, be sure you’ve come up with good ones, and then remember those and always use the same ones.
But someone else has already done that, and come up with ones that a lot of people already use anyway. So if I’m going to memorize a set, it might as well be those, because I know that none of them have confusing sound-alikes. Even in other common languages, which I couldn’t have easily checked on my own. And no, “Ciera” doesn’t count, because that’s not a word in any language.
I’ve found, though, that if I don’t say the “C as in…” part and just go into the “Charlie Hotel Romeo Oscar November Oscar Sierra”, that most people get confused. And for what it’s worth, I was never in the military or other relevant profession.
I use NATO. It’s ingrained, and it works well. Often when people substitute other words, they don’t substitute good ones and it doesn’t make things any clearer.
This. If you’re working with people who are familiar with the NATO alphabet (e.g., military people, or any people in a war zone), your communication with them will be less clear if you use alternate words. That’s kind of the whole point of language, to not have everyone use their own words.
I’ve worked with a lot of Brits over the years, so I might be able to understand someone who talked in Cockney rhyming slang. But they’d have to go slower.
Another thing I meant to mention but forgot - The NATO phonetic alphabet was designed to make communication easier over radio, which is often garbled and can drop out. So it’s not just about using words that start with the intended letter, it works because when everyone is using the same standardized alphabet, it has a good chance of being understood even if the listener only hears parts of the words. An example:
“Overwatch Control, Dustoff three-zero”
“Go ahead, three-zero”
“staticree zero has a mission reqstatic at coordinstatic Wstatickey staticango Foxtstatic seven-one-thrstatic-six-zerstatic-niner”
Chances are good that Overwatch Control got the coordinate WTF 7-1-3-6-9 on the first pass without asking Dustoff to repeat.
And even after all that, you still had a drop-out. I heard WTF 7-1-3-6-0-9. :smack:
And funnily enough I’ve sometimes seen the car name misspelled “Cutlass Sierra”.
Not an Archer fan, I take it?
No dropout, the missing zero was a typo on my part! 
That’s how I would’ve spelled it. Oops! 
Count me as another using solely NATO since the 1980s and my Marine Corps days.
And then there’s the good old USA, U as in Europe, S as in Especially, A as in Eight.
Roger, out.
funnier yet is GMC sells the Sierra full-size pickup. And for a number of years sold both the Olds Cutlass Ciera and GMC Sierra at the same time.
Not exactly the same thing, but I had a woman on the phone say this to me the other day when telling me her first name:
“Autumn, like the month”.
mmm
I guess Sierra is a popular name for vehicles. Here’s a review for yet another popular Sierra. A real nice mochine!
I don’t actually know the NATO alphabet well but try to use it. But sometimes people will respond with different words. Like I said “That’s D, Delta” and they responded “David?”
And the response is, “Duh.”
Never did the NATO or military or pilot or police thing, but I do occasionally find a need to get excruciatingly clear in spelling something out.
In the IT field my colleagues and I will help each other out with one of us reading passcodes or license keys while another enters the characters into an online field or software window that’s made to receive such data. We’ve settled on a quirk amongst us: We used to have to interrupt the flow of words with “capital ___” but sometimes that word was interpreted as “C” and whatever letter followed. So I suggested we use common words for lower-case letters, numbers for numbers, and people’s names for upper-case letters. The reasoning was that, at least in modern US culture*, we write people’s given names with a capital letter in the first position. Therefore sv6C would be read aloud as “stereo volume 6 Charlie”
Particularly with passwords and license keys getting longer and longer in the hope of thwarting algorithm-hackers and dictionary attacks, this has reduced our entry mistakes by about 80% and has greatly reduced the frustration of having to back-space through a dozen or more characters to correct “No, no…that character was supposed to be a capital! Did I forget to say that?”
–G!
*Japanese doesn’t distinguish upper/lower case in their kana or kanji.