Orwell s Use Of The Phonetic Alphabet In The Military...
The military, as a whole, has a countless number of sayings, slogans and acronyms for every, single
aspect of military life. Consequently, it feels like learning a new language to those newly indoctrinated
members of this culture; being required to learn a new alphabet, the phonetic alphabet, reinforces this
feeling. While the mastery of this language is slow and arduous, there is a larger purpose behind it. To
protect its service members as well as its assets, the military needs every part to run smoothly and
efficiently. Accordingly, they have crafted a language, and an alphabet, after George Orwell s heart:
one that leaves nothing up to interpretation, one which is terse, and builds a clear and consistent
picture of the point being made. Admittedly, when someone in the military attempts to spell a word
using the phonetic alphabet, it goes against Orwell s second rule: Never use a long word where a short
one will do, (519). Instead of spelling K I F E R, the spelling of my name becomes, Kilo, India,
Foxtrot, Echo, Romeo; obviously, this takes longer and would not be considered efficient Orwell. ...
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Most people, at one point or another, have been on the phone with someone, trying to spell out a word
or a code, and had a hard time hearing what one of the letters was. Perhaps the person on the other end
said something along the lines of, its b as in bog; however, to the person listening, the b as in bog
sounds a lot like d as in dog. To make matters worse, different people use different words to explain
what letter they are taking about in these types of situation. The military evades such a problem by
making one, uniform series of words to express every letter and number. This builds a consistency
which allows soldiers to focus on the real problems at hand, instead of trying to decipher what some
random word
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