It's worse because it's really easy to come up with a word that is hard to understand in unclear communications conditions and thus either remains ambiguous or, worse, suggests the wrong resolution of ambiguity to the listener. Standard phonetic alphabets like the NATO one are designed so that the words and pronunciations are very highly unambiguous even if the listener isn't familiar with the phonetic alphabet, and even moreso if the listener is familiar the alphabet.
It's also worse because if you have two speakers who are familiar with the use of a phonetic alphabet, you don't have to do “‘a' is in...”, you just spell out “Alpha Romeo Tango India Sierra Tango” (no, I have no idea why I picked that word for an example.)
I'm not sure it's so great when the listener doesn't know the NATO alphabet. A number of the words sound very similar to other english words, and some of the words are obscure.
For example, Charlie (pronounced char-lee or shar-lee) could be confused with barley, Karlie, hardly, Shirley, etc. Mike rhymes with dozens of words.
If you don't know the word 'sierra' you might be wondering, "was that fierra? Ciara? Tiara?"
I think using longer, simple words like,
Alphabet, Banana, Computer, Direction, Elephant, etc.
would be better for lay people. They're unambiguous and well-known.
> For example, Charlie (pronounced char-lee or shar-lee) could be confused with barley, Karlie, hardly, Shirley, etc.
The beauty of the phonetic alphabet is that there's nothing else on the phonetic alphabet that can be confused with "Charlie" regardless of how a non-English speaker pronounces it. If everyone is using the same phonetic alphabet, then the confused entity learns that "Sharlie/Shirley/hardly" stands in for "C."
Yep, that's my point. It was designed assuming both people know the phonetic alphabet. It's not so great when you're trying to use it over the phone with a tech support person who isn't familiar with the alphabet.
Yup, British postal codes are alphanumeric and I've never had a call center worker not follow when I read mine beginning "Sierra Oscar" rather than trying to just say the letters SO clearly enough. The codes are deliberately unambiguous (e.g. zero and the letter O can't occur in the same position) but it's less likely someone understands that and incorporates it into their parsing than that they're familiar with the NATO alphabet.
In the US Navy, because 5 sounds like fire, it's skipped when doing a countdown over a ship's PA system (called the 1MC). Countdowns are done for switching timezones/synchronizing watches, etc.
It's also worse because if you have two speakers who are familiar with the use of a phonetic alphabet, you don't have to do “‘a' is in...”, you just spell out “Alpha Romeo Tango India Sierra Tango” (no, I have no idea why I picked that word for an example.)