I personally hate it when I say the nato alphabet equivallent and somebody just gets confused. Like “what do you mean alpha, is that what I need to type?”. Or worse yet, they start using names and end up with the joke from Archer - “M as in Mancy” or other nondescript names for letters.

🎵Foxtrot… Uniform… Charlie… Kilo…! 🎶

(Bloodhound Gang song)

Zebra is written with S in some languages, so it would potentially cause trouble.

Zebra is much closer to Sierra and Papa, than Zulu is to any other word in that list - they are specifically chosen to be distinctly understandable in difficult-to-hear situations. And should they change it every time a new brand gets popular that’s kinda similar to one of the words?

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.

M as in mancy

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.

“Fox” could be confused with “box”, so it goes with “Foxtrot”.

Also, keep in mind that everything is a product of its time.

I prefer x as in xylophone myself

It was designed like that for a reason. There’s a lack of one syllable words there, and the ones that are there sound very different. It’s also used for messages that require precision that the average person doesn’t need in day to day life.

Not really, but it makes sense to me.

I learned the phonetic alphabet partly because of the fact that I obtained my amateur radio operator qualification. I’m a “ham” radio person.

Hearing these on the radio, which isn’t super clear to begin with in most cases, it’s much easier to use this way and almost trivial to understand others when they spell anything over the radio. Given this is the NATO alphabet, it’s used by all kinds of people, from ham operators like me, to government/military. Often in conjunction with some kind of communications system, often but not always radio communications, where the signal might be poor.

I think the original intent was to ensure that all letters sounded as unique as possible, so even if you only catch part of the word (maybe the rest is obfuscated by static), you still understand the what was said.

Beautiful, though they didn’t really describe dd well

this is an alphabet but the whole idea of the phonetic alphabet is to make communication more efficient, and I don’t think this achieves that.

Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo.

The NATO phonetic alphabet is incredibly useful, though it does suffer from some issues in similar sounds. During a recent high frequency (HF) worldwide competition (IARU-HF), weak-signal SSB stations sometimes had to spend a few minutes trying to complete a radio exchange because of similar sounding phonetic endings: “Was that whiskey one bravo alpha?”

“Negative, whiskey one tango alpha—TANGO alpha, over”

This happens so commonly, that many HF operators substitute other words in the same manner to enhance understanding: common ones are kilowatt, sugar, Germany, America, London, etc.

Someone made a whole book out of this home

Pretty sure it’s Ice Cream Sandwich for I.

Fuck me if someone tells me over the phone:

Cupcake, Upside down cake, Marshmallow

Quiche doesn’t really work, but otherwise it’s not bad.

Instructions unclear, stuck under the twisted metal of my vehicle. Send paramedics.