feels foolish that I never remember it

I use a different phonetic alphabet:

Thanks I hate it
We need the real, dirty version. Not the one you use for mom.
- Asshole Ballsack Cumdump Dickwad Ejaculate Fuckface Gooner Hand-job Incest Jizz Knob-gobbler Lube MILF Nipples Orgy Pussy Queef Rim-job Shithead Titfuck Urethra Vagina Wanker X-rated Yiff Zoo-porn
yuck. I will bully you off my line.

These guides always misspell Alfa

Alpha is confusing for not native English speakers, so it's supposed to be spelt with an F.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet#Alfa

At least they got Juliett correct. It's two T's to keep French speakers from mispronouncing it.
- I mean as a french speaker I would have also added a e, so Juliette
  But then I guess for everyone else it becomes Juliett/e/ or Juliettè

I appreciate the Archer reference

personally, I've always preferred this version:

A radio show I listened to years ago did a competition each day to update each letter of the phonetic alphabet. I don't remember most of them, but they decided that T should be "Technotechnotechno" and that always amused me.
Fingler, Umm?, Chunky, Kristen Stewart is not a great actress.
I always thought we should add the Hot Shots! callsigns
"Copy that, Purple Fluffer Nutter."
"Roger that, Milli Vanilli Chilly Willy."
fingler

For something so commonly used, it's got some pretty glaring flaws. Most critically, 'golf' and 'mike' - single syllable, which over radio comms often doesn't sound like shit. Compare to something like 'oscar', which even if either half of it gets all staticky you still hear "osc--" or "--car" which is enough to still receive an accurate exchange of info.

My more whiny complaints are that the number of syllables are inconsistent, F and X use compound words instead of one single complete word which feels... icky... x gets a pass cuz x is always janky and x-ray is perfect. Some of the entries rhyme with commonly used words that could confuse someone who's either inexperienced or in a stressful situation like being shot at. For example, "echo" could be misheard as "gecko" and even though "gecko" isn't on the list, our brains do stupid shit when they're saturated with adrenaline, so something like this should be as absolutely idiot-proof as possible.

If I could magic that fucker into something new, I'd shoot for:

every entry is exactly three syllables.
no two of the same syllables in any entry can rhyme with those two syllables of another entry. I.E., "Uniform" and "Chloroform" are not compatible because syllables 2 and 3 are too similar.
Each entry should be as common a word as possible, in as low/unspecialized a reading level as possible. I.E., "November" is recognizable by nearly everyone; vs something like "Ganglia" which is gibberish to anyone without specialty knowledge requiring them to be familiar with ganglia.
No compound or multiple word entries.
X gets a pass cuz x is always janky and x-ray is perfect.
Prototype phonetic alphabet must be first scrutinized by a panel consisting of a linguist, a speech pathologist, an English teacher, a 7 year old, a highschooler, a geriatric with severe hearing loss, and a junior enlisted US Marine. Their job is to find any potential for confusion.

Having a 7 year old and a junior enlisted US Marine seems redundant
- I mean... someone has to supervise the Marine...
But with your new rules, x can be xylophone so you don’t need the special case rule for x anymore.
- Ooh, good call!
In Amateur Radio, if our first calls are not received correctly, most experienced operators will switch up and use alternates for troublesome phonetics. America for Alpha, Germany for Golf, Kilowatt for Kilo. Some folks even use amusing ones. I once heard an American station using “Kentucky Fried Chicken” for their callsign ending in KFC.
- I once heard an American station using “Kentucky Fried Chicken” for their callsign ending in KFC.
  i mean that one is perfect

it seems hard unless you use it a lot and then it's second nature. I've had to actually stop myself from using it in places like for a drive-thru pickup code, as that never goes well.

I was using this to read put a gift card code to make a purchase over the phone with apple (don't ask why, it was a shit show), and when I gave Sierra, the person thought it was C as in Ciara. Had to repeat the whole thing over again.
- Sierra's even the name of one of their OS versions.
  "Ciara". smh

I've always enjoyed playing with folks who actually know this by giving them intentionally misleading cues. Instead of "E as in Echo", say "G as in Gecko". That sort of thing. Cuneiform, Frisky, Mango, Oubliette, Zima...

Now I want all 26 done this way... D as in django would probably be the best though.
- P as in pterodactyl
- O as in oiseau
- You can also just mess with them like:
  M as in Mnemonic
  N as in Ne
  O as in Opossum
  P as in Pneumonia

I remember someone screaming for a code down a phone line once and my mate started with the whole “G for gnome” , “P for pterodactyl” etc.

I laughed.

one of my last jobs needed me to use this for reading inventory locations to a crane operator over a phone. he always seemed slightly bemused that I didn't know the phonetic alphabet and had to make up my own phonetics for him

Tiajuana-Gringo-Water-Fiver-Zero
- exactly. I KNOW that dude was clowning me as soon as I hung up the phone 😂
I can imagine the laughs at all the words you might have come up with. "It's at uhh..... Narwhal Sellotape Banana!"
A reminder though, to anyone who needs it - don't be condescending to others for not knowing things. Everything we know, we had to learn.
For me, I learnt the phonetic alphabet after getting frustrated one too many times trying to give my postal code and car reg on a bad phone line.

M as in Mancy. You would know!

The "calls with your mom or diffusing a bomb"...that whole section seems weird.
- Wait is this whole thing somehow an Archer reference
- Haha, didn't catch that it was "diffusing" you know I guess a pretty efficient way to do that would be to detonate it.

Always been a bit annoyed that people describe Morse as a binary code, it isn't, it's technically trinary, you have 3 symbols, dot, dash, and space. Without a space you can't discern the difference between "hi" and "eeeeee".

I dunno that’s kind of like saying computer binary is trinary because there is a distinct separation of the bits
- But there's not a distinct separation of the bits
It is about like the difference between SPI and I2C serial communications.
I struggled with that one for a little while. My intuition of serial is more like SPI where there is a dedicated clock structure from a clock source that is separate from the data transmission. Or like with UART serial where the clock baud rate must be known or set in advance to establish communications.
However, with I2C serial it is only a 2 wire data interface, and the clock is built into the data. That is the main serial communications method used for most analog-world type sensors, like temperature, pressure, real time clocks chips, and many slow types of EEPROM persistent memory. SPI is used for small simple displays in embedded devices, and stuff like the flash memory chip that stores your bootloader on your computer. UART is most often the remote serial terminal access on stuff like your computer and router, though all of these com peripherals have exceptions in use cases.
The way I2C works is that the data line is always held in a high state with a weak pull up resistor. The devices attached to this data line use NPN transistors to pull the line low. Then the protocol establishes who gets to talk and when and how.

M like in Mancy

Adam Charlie Adam Boy

For years I thought U was unicorn.

Maybe it should be!
It can be! As long as they hear the U and know what you mean, who cares.

I know these... And for 20 years I refuse to use any, its way funnier to hear the cringe on the other side.

Bonus points to use things that sound like other things for example: "K as in Knife"

Some options not yet in these threads:
A as in Aether.
E as in Ewe
D as in Django.
H as in Herb (depends on locale).
J as in Jalapeno.
P as in Phonetic.
T as in Tsunami.
- Yesssssss And depending what part of the world you are talking to you can also pronounce the "J" hard in Jalapeno to really get people going. I used to have to do this all the time over the phone in my old job and still have a chuckle about it.

I once saw a KFC entrance that had the pattern .. ... . above it. I didn't tell them.

AALK????
- The person installing the pattern clearly didn't know Morse code and probably just thought it was a decorative pattern.
  It's upside-down.
._…
That "F" has an extra dot, too, no?

There was a very large number of people who seem to want to write C for Sierra and it's really concerning.

Not only does it mean they've never heard of Sierra Leone which shows a distinct lack of geopolitical knowledge, but they've also never heard of Sierra software which shows that they're not worth talking to.

Also that they thought that the phonetic alphabet, created for making it less ambiguous to describe English letters verbally, would decide to use one of the exception cases to the pronunciation of the letter C where it takes on the identical sound to the letter S, to help avoid confusion.
- I'm sure a lot of people don't know about the phonetic alphabet and just think I'm coming up with equivalents on the fly.
  I once had an engineer go "G as in, ....er... Oh Geee?", which I suppose worked, sort of.
Or Sierra Trading Post, the best place to get your outdoor gear.

I practice this by reading off license plates while I’m driving.

It’s not a useful skill at all because the only time I use it is calling somewhere, and nobody else knows them.

You have to say it anyway, make them the weird one for not putting two and two together. This shit was created for a reason.
- I have found it really useful for confusing AI phone support agents too. Reading a postcode as "Alpha bravo 1 2 3 charlie delta" and it had no idea what to do so put me through to a person.

That Morse code tidbit is actually super interesting. I'm curious how systematically they went with it, like E-I-S-H were the most common, and are ascending in dit counts. And then A being one dit and dash being the next most frequent. Or some combination of "values" for a dit/dash

I always liked this chart for Morse code:
I’m curious how systematically they went with it
Allow me to introduce you to Alfred Vail.

FYI, the semaphore signs are shown from the listener's PoV, so if you are signing to someone, you have to mirror the directions you see in this image. So for example to send a J, you raise your right flag and point the left out level.

It's ALFA https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/declassified_136216.htm

Don't ask me how I know. It's annoying.

Spelt alfa wrong though

It's correct
- Incorrect. Alpha is the Greek letter.
  Alfa is spelt this way in the phonetic alphabet to help with pronunciation in all countries, as 'ph' often makes a different sound.

Foxtrot

Uniform
- Charlie

I know about this. I still choose my own rules. Once I said "X for xylophone". It makes things fun.

One time my roommate (who worked at Amazon) did that and people were giggling over the words he chose, most of them were Pokemon iirc.
X as in Xanax Y as in Yggdrasil Z as in Zed
- Z is pronounced as "zed" in the UK.

I think the civvie version is easier for the average person. The military phonetics are just 'odd' enough that it is more of a chore to remember.

I use a modified version with

I -> Indigo
W -> Water

Pretty cool about the peace symbol

Because it almost never becomes more of a time-save to learn the phonetic alphabet than the 3 seconds it costs every 3 years when someone is saying "did you say a or h?" to me.

This only matters for people that regularly (at least once every few days) need to spell something out loud to someone, or if an error would lead to serious consequences. Almost no one is in those positions.

Working in a call center, I can definitely agree that you don't need to know the proper NATO phonetic alphabet, because 'A as in apple' and 'M as in Mary' work just as well.
But I do wish more people would say something to that effect because I lose more than 3 seconds every day to 'Did you say N or M' while on the phones.
- I picked up the NATO alphabet while working in a callcenter. I also picked up that most customers can't figure out what the heck you mean by "address it to Fort Worth spell Foxtrot Oscar Romeo Tango Whiskey Oscar Romeo Tango Hotel" so I shifted to only spelling sound-a-like letters phonetically "address it to Ashwaubenon spelled A-S-H-W-A-U-B as in Bravo-E-N as in Nancy-O-N as in Nancy"
Yep, I only started to learn this when I needed it at work. People who use radios like police, fire, military, that makes sense. Otherwise, my girlfriend and I sometimes use it when we have trouble understanding each other.
I've been trying to use food items for the alphabet. Apple, banana, carrot, etc. It's not perfect but I like it.

This guy is the only reason i remember the phonetic alphabet

I do because of this one.
Ended up not learning morse, but at least memorised the phonetic alphabet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_qQZ92onhU

Thanks, that's going in my bookmarks!

They really missed an opportunity to get the semaphore to look like the letters they represent. At least get the I, K, and T to line up (V gets a pass because at least that pattern goes to the U).

I use the NATO everyday at work and I'll be handing this one out to new folks lol.

I know all of this right up until the person on the phone asks me to spell it and then suddenly my mind goes blank. Every time.

Papa and Mike

So the peace sign is GK?

ND, for nuclear disarmament.