I had to make a 999 call a few years back because I saw a woman faint and bang her head on a concrete pavement. Although I was in the local area which I know very well, it was really difficult - when put on the spot in an emergency - to describe my exact location.
Yeah. I regularly test myself when bored while driving to verbalize where I am. "Highway 401 East.. uhh I think I passed an exit for Guelph a while ago? I don't see a marker at the moment."
Off topic: if you're often bored while driving, learn the NATO phonetic alphabet using license plates around you. It helps me four or five times a year when reading off things to people in customer service. The beauty of it is that people who don't know it can still understand it when said to them.
Do you know how many times I use the phonetic alphabet and then have to simplify even more because the person on the other end of the phone doesn't understand it? :D
F for what? S? F is now Frank and S is now Sugar, because Foxtrot and Sierra often just get "was that s or f? What is Soxtrot?" it's ridiculous. I think everyone should be taught the NATO phonetic alphabet in school. When I'm talking to someone on the phone, I don't want to have to resort to Apple Banana Chocolate like we're all 5.
Also, I live just down the road from Guelph and worked in Guelph for a while :)
> When I'm talking to someone on the phone, I don't want to have to resort to Apple Banana Chocolate like we're all 5.
So, the solution to not wanting to feel self conscious while saying decidedly simple and inoffensive words, and for task simple enough that people could probably be given a simple sentence or two instruction (choose a word that doesn't sound like another one) and could come up with valid examples (like you just did), is to force them to learn a semi-universal and generic set of mostly nonsense words and names?
I did tech support for years, and any time I had to have someone type out a specific set of characters, it was not hard to just rely on common names, animals, or other extremely common words. The amount of wasted man-years in teaching and testing a phonetic alphabet for such little benefit would be mind boggling. The military has very specific requirements which change the cost benefit analysis greatly (verbal communication during battle conditions, for one), but those don't really apply to most people. It's trivial to come up with something that works well on the fly.
No, because it doesn't work just as well, because everyone comes up with different words.
The NATO alphabet isn't just used by NATO, it's used worldwide by civil and commercial aviation personnel (pilots & ATC). There's a reason for this: these words were carefully selected because they're unique and won't be confused with other words.
It absolutely should be taught in school; it's not hard at all, and everyone has problems spelling words out on noisy communication channels (like cellphones).
It could be taught in preschools along with simple things like basic gun safety, swimming pool safety, and how to avoid perverts. Unfortunately all of these things are educational luxuries for the rare kid with parents that take the time to teach them to their kids. It seems like intelligent people could put together a laundry list of simple, easy-to-teach things along these lines that could be taught in schools for very little money.
Depends on the location. In Japan it's a waste of time and resources, in US it can save lives.
I was field stripping and re-assembling AKM in school (just like everyone else in the class), on the clock, under watchful eye of a real war veteran. And shooting .22 rifles in school's basement. Not a big deal. Admittedly we were older than 5 years, but not by much.
If you've got more than two braincells to rub together and are communicating with an ignorant listener, the off-the-cuff improvised toddler friendly vocabulary version probably works well enough for you.
The problem is when an improvised phonetic alphabet is being used because the speaker doesn't know a standardized phonetic alphabet. These people almost never take care to pick words that don't sound like other words. They think they're being helpful but often they're being less intelligible than if they weren't trying to use any phonetic alphabet at all. That is where the real benefit lies in teaching people to do it properly. It doesn't take long at all to teach a child the NATO phoenetic alphabet; your objection to the time it takes reeks of anti-intellectualism.
I learned it in an afternoon as a small child watching Dukes of Hazzard sometime between the ages of 4 and 10, along with how to jump my car over a river, how to run 'shine, escape from the law and be a good ol' boy... it's amazing what useful skills we learned from 80s kids shows :P
I use the NATO alphabet when spelling my name to people in customer service. About 1 in 4 service representatives seem completely baffled, like they have never heard anything like it, and ask me to respell a 2nd or 3rd time. I even say "B as in Bravo, E as Echo..." because "Bravo, Echo..." just seems to confuse them even more...
One time when I called 911 I was so stressed I couldn't remember my own address. I had to pick up a piece of mail and read it. Stress does weird things to you.
In the 90s as a teeneager working in a mall, I had a customer who had an emergency, I called 999 and gave my address as $shopname, $mallname but the call handler didn't know the mall and wouldn't send an ambulance without a street name. I imagine the local responding ambulance would have trouble locating it by street name since the mall is giant and has entrances on several streets.
I witnessed a car crash on a local highway yesterday morning. I called 911, but couldn't recall immediately if I was on the eastbound side of the highway or the westbound. With exits only every few miles, that could have been really unfortunate.
