A: Now I Know My
When airplane pilots and military personnel need to refer to letters of the alphabet, they use the NATO phonetic alphabet. In this system there's a word for each letter, to avoid confusion among letters whose names sound similar (especially over a noisy radio):
- Alpha
- Bravo
- Charlie
- Delta
- Echo
- Foxtrot
- Golf
- Hotel
- India
- Juliet
- Kilo
- Lima
- Mike
- November
- Oscar
- Papa
- Quebec
- Romeo
- Sierra
- Tango
- Uniform
- Victor
- Whiskey
- Xray
- Yankee
- Zulu
(Thanks to PJ Groeneveldt for refreshing my memory on these.) Some organizations that use the above phonetic alphabet use slightly different spelling on some items; for details, see the amazingly exhaustive multilingual phonetic alphabets list on the Web. Note that there are also special words for certain numerical digits: specifically, 3 is "tree," 4 is "fower," 5 is "fife," and 9 is "niner." Note also that the WWII naval radio phonetic alphabet that starts out "Able, Baker, Charlie" precedes (and is superseded by) the NATO alphabet above.
In recognition of the start of a new six-month cycle of columns, here are some other alphabetic amusements.
There's a parlor game in which players take turns adding words to a list, with each word starting with the next letter of the alphabet in sequence; each player in turn has to recite the whole list so far before adding a new one. One person might start, "I went on a trip, and I took an abacus." The next could add, "I went on a trip, and I took an abacus and a bowling ball." And so on. You can make it a little harder by doing themed vacations, with all words required to be in a certain category, such as living things: "I went on a trip and I took along an aardvark, some bacteria, and a camel."
Jim Moskowitz, Chaos Golubitsky, Kim Gallup, and Amy Swift recently played "I went on a guilt trip, and I took..." Here's what they took:
- my Anxiety
- Bad feelings
- a Crying jag
- Despair
- Existential angst
- Failure
- a Guilt complex
- my Humility
- my Insanity
- my Jealousy
- a Killjoy
- my Loathing
- Melancholy
- Narcissism
- my Oppression
- Persecution
- my Quarrelsome nature
- my Repression
- my Sadomasochism
- Tantrums
- Unrest
- my Vindictiveness
- Wallowing
- my Ex
- Youthful indiscretions
- and the Zeitgeist.
(I changed one of the items that was something of an in-joke.)
Jim was also one of the creators, along with Bhadrika Love and David Van Stone, of a new version of the old alphabet song, to the same tune as the original:
A, B, I, G, R, X, Q
M, Z, L, V, K-C-W [emphasis on last syllable—double-you]
T, Y, F
H, U, E
N, S, P
O, J, D
Now I know my A-B-I's;
Next time you won't be surprised!