Avoid Misspellings, Save a Life
Whiskey, tango, foxtrot...do you copy? In honor of the last knockings of Memorial Day/Week, please enjoy this homage to an old tool used by militaries the world over: the so-called phonetic or spelling alphabet. It goes by a few official names, including Alpha Bravo Charlie, the more popular NATO phonetic alphabet as well as the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet. As a card-carrying nerd, I occasionally recite it just to prove to myself that I have not forgotten everything (yet). I am also convinced, despite my current status as a relatively ordinary person in a small Southern city, it will someday come in handy and I will use it to MacGyver my way out of an extraordinary situation that has yet to occur. No matter, on with the task at hand.
Remember the children’s game telephone? Not the one where you pretend the president is calling you on a banana – the other one. The one that socialized us for gossip: Mary whispers a simple phrase into Sally’s ear, and then Sally does so to the girl on her left and so on until, miraculously, the phrase morphs from “Johnny skinned his knee yesterday” to “Bonnie grinned with bees on the hay.” When the stakes are higher than outbursts of laughter, this system is in place to mitigate the transmission of misinformation. The NATO phonetic alphabet assigns a word to each letter of the alphabet to ensure proper understanding and correct spelling of words (in English) meant to transcend culture and language. Naturally, it’s meant to avoid any misunderstandings which might otherwise prove disastrous. In short, use this method if your life depends on correct spelling.
It was actually derived from a much older system, comprised of visual and audio symbols and took a while to gain traction in the form we now know today. There were many drafts submitted to various authorities as early as the late 1920s, but by 1959 a list was codified and accepted internationally by the presiding body of international radio communications, the International Telecommunications Union. For a more detailed account of the code’s evolution, click here. Though the standard has been set down in English, there were a few experiments including a Spanish version (“Ana Brazil”) for Latin American countries and efforts to include words with sounds common to French, Spanish, and English into one code, but the notion was abandoned amidst too much overlap and confusion.
And there you have it, more information than perhaps you had just moments ago.
Thanks for reading; you’re a real Sierra Alpha India November Tango.
References
About ITU. (n.d.). Retrieved June 01, 2016, from http://www.itu.int/en/about/Pages/default.aspx
Alpha Bravo Charlie info - NATO Phonetic Alphabet. (n.d.). Retrieved June 01, 2016, from http://www.alphabravocharlie.info/
International Spelling Alphabet. (n.d.). Retrieved June 01, 2016, from http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/international-spelling-alphabet.htm
Military Alphabet. (n.d.). Retrieved June 01, 2016, from http://www.militaryspot.com/military-alphabet/
