:: Another Bad Creation ::

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

My dad has been an amateur radio operator since long before I was born, so I grew up hearing spelling alphabets, especially of the NATO kind, waft from his equipment-cluttered bedroom-turned-"ham shack". I'd love to have a winsome anecdote where as a child I mistakenly presumed my dad to be heading to Lima to dance the tango and foxtrot with Juliet in November (while, since it was Peru, bringing a "kilo" along), but the truth is as a child it was gibberish.

Once I understood the point, however, I remember thinking how cool it was that the system was constructed to avoid any internal confusion, with every word having a distinct sound from the others despite using a minimum of syllables. But that's not all - as I found out today, the NATO Alphabet was tested to ensure that speakers from 31 different countries would recognize each word as distinct and be able to pronounce it. That's quite a feat of phonetic engineering.

However, the list lacks musical pop-culture kitsch, which spans far more than 31 nations and even transcends language itself. While the genres did not exist at the time of NATO's original alphabet, an alternative system would draw from the names of 80's hair-metal bands and early-90's "New Jack Swing" groups. For example:

Al-B-Sure Blackstreet Color-Me-Badd Def-Leppard En-Vogue Faster-Pussycat Gorky-Park Hellion Il-D-Extreme Jodeci Keith-Sweat London Mötley-Crüe Nelson Ozzy Poison Queensrÿche R-Kelly Stryper Tony-Toni-Toné! Vixen Winger Xscape Young-MC

This would be a superior approach in every way except that it is incapable of expressing the letters U and Z.

Posted by morland @ 06:11 PM

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