An office conversation that went further than expected.
At work we were discussing which phonetic alphabet to use when spelling things out over the phone. I’d always assumed there was one alphabet — the one I’d learned as NATO standard from 1954:
Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu.
Turns out there are others. The RAF 1942–43 version starts: Apple, Beer, Charlie, Dog, Edward, Freddy… which is both more charming and less universal. The Esperanto version gives you Asfalto, Barbaro, Centimetro, Doktoro, and Elemento, which manages to be both more international in intent and completely unusable in practice.
My favorite discovery was that the NATO alphabet we use now was standardized partly because earlier versions caused actual communication errors in combat. People misheard “Fox” as “Box,” “Dog” as “Bog.” The current version was designed with controlled vocabulary — every word was tested to be clearly distinguishable across languages and accent backgrounds.
This is a small example of a thing I find consistently interesting: the amount of engineering that goes into what looks like arbitrary convention. The phonetic alphabet isn’t arbitrary. Someone ran tests. Someone discovered that “Edward” and “Easy” are hard to tell apart when someone is yelling at you over a radio in a war zone.
I use Alpha Bravo Charlie. I will continue to use Alpha Bravo Charlie. But now I know it’s a considered choice rather than just the thing that exists.