In Search of a Letter-Perfect Way to Communicate

I am surprised by the response to my column on the modernization of the international phonetic alphabet. It has provoked more letters than my countering a prediction that a woman would star in major league baseball.

Most of those writing express disbelief that I and my former colleague Ray Hebert could not have been aware of the changes in the code since we were in the Merchant Marine (I in the late 1930s, Hebert in the early 1940s).

“Your colleague,” write Paul and Carolynn Barnes-Taylor, “must have enjoyed a life of extraordinary insularity and, with respect, one must apply the same criticism in your direction.”

Numerous others confirm that the code was changed by an international commission after World War II to make it more easily understood by our allies in the NATO countries.

I was right, it seems, in suspecting that the old one-syllable words-- dog, fox, king, love --were changed to two-syllable words-- delta, foxtrot, kilo, lima --to make them more readable in imperfect radio transmissions that might skip a single syllable.

The main reason, though, was to replace the old American code with words that would be more readily understood by French, German, Spanish, Italian and other allies. Thus George became golf , tare became tango , jig became Juliet , negative became November and yoke became Yankee .

Charles E. Miller of Sacramento notes that the new international code is in English, but many of its words are of foreign origin, or widely used in other countries, e.g., alpha, bravo, delta, Sierra and tango .

Jerome Kirk of Laguna Beach notes that the alphabet under discussion is the International Communications Union alphabet (established in 1956), but that telephone companies, such as General Telephone of California, use names in identifying letters. General Telephone’s list, for example, begins Alice, Bertha, Charles, David, Edward, Frank . . . .

Kirk recalls with pleasure that he once overheard a Peruvian travel agent coding his name with a mixture of the two--” kilo, Inez, Rose, kilo .”

The new alphabet, however, does not fit happily into every contingency.

Thomas W. Tanner of Culver City tells of a retired Navy aviator named James D. Ramage who is known affectionately throughout the service as Jig Dog Ramage. “If you were to suggest he change his name to Juliet Delta Ramage, I think he might suggest you be keelhauled.”

Harrison Stephens of Claremont recalls that in 1944, while “swinging for endless days at anchor in a humid New Guinea port and talking about life back in the U.S., we didn’t refer to Unit Sail (1942 Merchant Marine) or today’s Uniform Sierra (today’s drab usage). It was Uncle Sugar . You can’t improve on that.”

William Sanford LaSor of Altadena concedes that sugar is imperfect, having a sh sound in English, but doubts that Sierra is better, since its initial letter may be taken for a C . “ Sam would have been better, or even Suzy .”

James A. Skeoch, representing Boomers of Remarkable Eminence (BORE), suggests an alphabet for the boomer generation: aerobics, Beemer, Cuisinart, daycare, Evian, futon, Galleria, hairstylist, investment, Jacuzzi, kickback, lawyer, money, network, oatbran, phone, quarterly, remodel, self, tofu, urban, video, winecooler, ex (as in ex-husband, ex-wife, ex-family), yogurt, Zen. Of course, that is more in the field of social comment than communications.

My colleague Gladwin Hill remembers the alphabet reporters used when spelling names for their rewrite men: apple, boy, Charlie, Dan, Edward, Frank, George and so on. A State House reporter named Fred Brine used to use code words as comments on the personality of the person whose name he was spelling: “L for lascivious, Gov. James M. for meretricious Curley. . . .”

I remember that when I was a reporter I used an alphabet of code words to spell difficult names over the phone, but I always used different words, and the most polysyllabic I could think of.

Thus, if I were spelling Giacomo, I might say, “G as in giantomachy, i as in infrangible , a as in aphrodisiac , c as in contumacious , o as in onomatopoeia, m as in malapropism and o as in orthochromatic. “

It probably wouldn’t be a good way to land an airplane, but it kept me and my rewrite men on our toes.