quickly, two early things

[mrissa]

1. My gmail offered me the following headline: Nude teens raise eyebrows. They're teens. They probably roll their eyes and shrug as well, and we don't put that in headlines. Instead we do our best to prune it out of our YA and other teen-protagonist novels.

2. Last night when I was getting markgritter from the airport, the person on the PA called a passenger to "gate G-11, that's G as in Goth, 11." Other boarding areas include "D as in death" and "B as in blackness," one supposes, or else "A as in Angle, C as in Celt," depending on what kind of Goth she meant.

Comments

[ckd]

It probably was "Golf", but "Goth" is far more amusing.

Due to the sheer number of alphanumeric serial numbers I have had to read over the phone in my life, I have become used to using the NATO (and ICAO, etc) standard alphabet. I do generally pronounce "Papa" incorrectly, with the accent on the first syllable instead of the second.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

I do generally pronounce "Papa" incorrectly, with the accent on the first syllable instead of the second.

That's not incorrect. I don't think I've ever heard it pronounced with second syllable stress in English. If you happen to be speaking Spanish, it just means you're talking about a potato rather than a father.

[ckd]

ICAO has a specified pronunciation standard for the alphabet (yeah, I hadn't known that either, until recently). That specifies "pahPAH".

(I will probably never manage to remember that when I'm actually using it.)

I also rarely say "niner".

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Ah. I thought you were going the other direction with that: pronouncing it wrong in reality due to ICAO, rather than the other way around.