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Comment by deathanatos | Hacker News Reader

This makes me think of two things:

1. the NATO alphabet. (Alfa, bravo, charlie, delta…) It's surprisingly easy to memorize: it will only take you a few sittings of practice. And it's useful, for when you need to turn letters into words. And then people cutely wonder if you're ex-military.

2. I tie a small ribbon to my luggage. It could be anything: string, tinsel. If you're familiar with wine glass charms, same idea. It makes the bag identifiable from distance, so long as the charm is in line of sight. It does not, remarkably, stop strangers from grabbing the wrong bag, but it does get funny if they insist they recognize their bag when you ask them "you tied sparkly pink ribbon to your bag?"

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The NATO alphabet is an uncanny intersection of being highly memorable and having carefully engineered properties across several dimensions. Whoever designed it did a brilliant job.

It is sticky as hell and surprisingly useful. I do assume that people who know it are ex-military but that isn’t entirely reliable in the US. A lot of other people picked it up, in part because it is so easy to learn by osmosis.

I know it from amateur radio, emergency services, and maritime communications, it's "officially" the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, shorthanded by some as the NATO Alphabet.

Others may know it by virtue of being fans of, or simply exposed to the Bloodhound Gang.

( FWiW I'm neither in nor from middle North America )

Was really helpfull when making international phone call to services like IRS or sometime good providers. Trying to spell out my french name and long adress or some order number with my strong accent was such a pain until then ^^

> Whoever designed it did a brilliant job.

It was an iterative process. Various words have been replaced over time, as problems became obvious.

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

RobWords made a video about it a few weeks ago! https://youtu.be/UAT-eOzeY4M

It's nigh-universal in the travel industry.

Once upon a time I read the joking phrase "M as in Mancy" and now it is the only thing I can ever think of when trying to spell out the letter M.

Perhaps I have now infected one of you. I am sorry.

This was originated (or at least popularized) in an episode of Archer from season 1. It remains maybe my favorite 5 minutes of comedy ever out to screen. It's just so tight!

https://youtube.com/watch?v=dNYMQpcqscA

I once had a customer say, ”G as in dog”. Yes.

In my head I also maintain what I call the "adversarial NATO alphabet", which is sadly incomplete, but contains stuff like, "C, as in sea"; "Q, as in cue"; "T, as in tea", "I, as in eye".

An anecdote: I easily remember short-ish (pins, phone numbers) number combinations, learn completely new alphabets of new languages easily enough, just like their words, but I struggle to learn the NATO alphabet: the words have no meaning and I don't perceive them as atomic enough like a letter or number is, so it mostly looks like a large amount of random noise to me, like having to learn pi to 100 digits.

I forced myself to learn the NATO alphabet recently by using some online flashcards. Nothing complex, just shows the letter and I have to recall the word, then click to see if I got it right. Didn't take very long to get it down, and I go through them every few days to verify recall.

On a side note, the NATO alphabet is quite normalised in the Netherlands - most telephone operators will default to it when providing you information and likewise there is an expectation on you to use it when providing spelling sensitive information such as emails.

Same in UK - I usually use it when giving my postcode to people.

Why not just put a name tag on your luggage?

While effective, a tag is not efficient. Namely it misses two properties: "quickly" and "at a distance".

I have a (knock-off) Moomin character as my tag: now it is again quickly recognisable at a distance.

I have that too, of course! Can't read the name tag from across the baggage claim though, but sparkly ribbon + case design you can, and you can be 100% confident that that's your bag a stranger just grabbed.

My solution was quicker and faster: buy luggage that is not black.

It now is recognizable at 100 yds against a pile of luggage. OK, a minority of luggage is also non-black, but there's a range of colors. Mine is a medium blue, and so false positives are about 1%, and false negatives are nil.

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