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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

As an adult who tries to remember the NATO phonetic alphabet but can't because I only use it once per month, I don't make up words "for fun" or "to be cute". I do it because I can't remember the NATO word. Compared to just saying the letters, the words I choose certainly do reduce ambiguity, even if using the NATO alphabet would go even further.

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Some good advice I got from a HAM was to read license plates in your head using the NATO alphabet. Their letters are mostly random so you tend to see each letter at roughly the same frequency and it can be done daily without taking away time from your schedule. Being random also prevents you from just remembering the order of the words and actually associating them with their respective letters.

After doing that for a week or two (I was bike commuting at the time), I had it pretty much memorized.

This is mostly fine if only done for ambiguous letters and if the understanding is that it is done to reduce ambiguity. There is a contingent of people who painstakingly spell out every letter with a phonetic from their own system and it requires the listener to do a lot more decoding to the point of actually increasing ambiguity. "My name is Michelle that's M/N as in Nail/Mail! I as in Icecream! ..." Nichelle is confused about why we use words to spell out certain letters.

Same, but once every 2 years. Just email me for goodness sake!

Then you'll have to spell your email address using NATO phonetic alphabet.

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