Numbers can be confusing, especially when spoken aloud. Effective compensation communication requires clear understanding of numbers when they are used in an oral presentation. Serendipity strikes again, with an internet news story about oral audio practices that finally justifies an article about clarity in numbers and funny phonics. Huh?* Without going into the details, I spent many years on the telephone rattling off license codes for access to individually secured salary survey databases and discovered first-hand how confusing letters and numbers can be when spoken aloud. A sample might be S4F5E-387X9-U2TV1, for example. Yes, I know, words cause more confusion than numbers, and that’s part of my point here. Our trade requires us to use both.
When speaking out the sequence over the phone, it seemed simpler to use a well recognized international code rather than make up a new word for every letter or number. Military experience made the NATO standard phonetic alphabet, shown below, instinctive for me; but it occasionally was a source of communication error.
Saying “sierra, fore, foxtrot, five, echo” would confuse some listeners. Did “fore” mean F or 4? “Number fore” usually worked, but some phonetic equivalents of letters like Sierra for S were problematic. One geographically challenged fellow once responded with “Ciera, like the car model?” So I began to replace the official “Sierra” for S with “Sunshine,” which no one ever misunderstood. Likewise, “Foxtrot” for F once brought a response, “You mean eff tee, right?” Obviously not a Fred Astaire Dance Studio graduate, he thought foxtrot was two separate words. My substitute for Foxtrot became Firefly, which always worked. You may note that the clarity and precison of both practical options were reinforced by the redundant placement of the significant spoken letter sound: two ss in Sunshine and two fs in Firefly.
Of course, local national oral pronunciation patterns still brought some questions. Brits, for instance, tend to use Zed for Z more often than Zulu, although English flyers and international pilots recognized the standard homonynm used for flight communications. For those who could care less about English and Greek word roots, homophones sound the same but can have different meanings (and usually do). Homonymns sound alike but always mean something else.
I must admit to the occasional temptation to employ alternative taxonomies to explain letters and numbers. Try some of the optional Funny Phonics samples shown below and see if you can’t seriously mess with minds that way.
While illustrating the potential for confusion in letter/number communication, I actually held back here, because I had created even more obscure matches for most letters. A could also be Awe or Axe. G could be Gel, Gnaw or Gnome. However, I found it impossible to generate a third level of complexity for one letter. Can you guess which it was?
E. James (Jim) Brennan is Senior Associate of ERI Economic Research Institute, the premier publisher of interactive pay and living-cost surveys. After over 40 years in HR corporate and consulting roles throughout the U.S. and Canada, he’s pretty much been there done that (articles, books, speeches, seminars, radio/TV, advisory posts, in-trial expert witness stuff, etc.), serves on the Advisory Board of the Compensation and Benefits Review and will express his opinion on almost anything.
*a recent study in linguistics revealed that “huh?” is an interrogatory interjective phrase understood in virtually every language and by every culture in the world. Sorry about the ad that precedes this audio clip of “huh?” in different languges, but it shows the nationalities recorded.
Creative Commons image courtesy of grahambones
I have a nearly perfect success rate at making an awkward experience out of any phone call in which I have to dictate a letter/number combination. I printed the phonetic alphabet out and stuck it on the side of my monitor. Thanks!
Posted by: David Scott | 12/19/2013 at 01:28 PM
Just a little Holiday present for all and sundry. It's nice to know that there are ways we can produce "the wrong numbers" that do NOT involve bad data or inaccurate computations. Or perhaps we can simply take comfort in a new way to solve old problems that pop up when speaking "compensation" numbers.
Posted by: E. James (Jim) Brennan | 12/19/2013 at 01:45 PM
The Puzzle Palace will offer a guess on the public phonics challenge - is it the letter Q?
Posted by: Chris Dobyns | 12/19/2013 at 05:23 PM
Q = quelque or quay
Posted by: [email protected] | 12/19/2013 at 05:40 PM
That's not it; quick or queue are my third and fourth choices in the "Q" category.
Posted by: E. James (Jim) Brennan | 12/19/2013 at 06:04 PM
X?
Posted by: [email protected] | 12/19/2013 at 07:30 PM
Yep. X marked my difficult spot. Xenography and xenobiology are the only other confusing homonyms that came to mind for "X" homophones, but I dismissed them as too arcane and not found in normal usage. Maybe I should have checked a dictionary, but I considered that cheating and just gave up after exhausting my remembered vocabulary.
Posted by: E. James (Jim) Brennan | 12/19/2013 at 07:59 PM
Good post, but this is why I pretty much *always* e-mail numerical information.
Posted by: Ben | 12/20/2013 at 12:05 AM