Dollhouse

Joss Whedon’s upcoming series Dollhouse is about people who can be temporarily programmed with any personality or skills. The Actives, as they’re called, spend time between missions at a facility called The Dollhouse, where they have only rudimentary personalities of their own, and their names reflect this; the characters announced so are called Echo, Sierra, Victor, and November. Get it? They’re named according to the phonetic alphabet.

No, no, not that phonetic alphabet, the other one—the words used in radio communication to spell out words unambiguously. Assuming Whedon doesn’t intend to name his characters after numbers—which is presumably just the sort of thing he’s trying to avoid by using the radio alphabet—that leaves the 26 letters as possible names. While there’s nothing preventing him from naming characters Uniform or Whiskey, I suspect he’s going to stick to the more name-sounding letters, so his possible name-space for future Actives includes Charlie, Delta, India, Juliet, Mike, November, Oscar, and Romeo (a potential boyfriend for Juliet?).

This leads me to my idea, which is either a prediction of what’s going to happen at some point in the show, or (if he hasn’t thought of it yet) a freely offered suggestion for Whedon. I think that at some point in the show, it will be revealed that there’s another Dollhouse organization somewhere in the world, possibly an older one, and the Actives in that organization are named after the WWII-era Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet. The letters in that alphabet that might make good character names include Able (Abel?), Baker, Easy, Fox, George, King, Nan, Peter, Roger, and William.

Remember, you read it here first.

There have apparently been quite a few different radio alphabets. In addition to the ones listed on the Wikipedia page for the NATO alphabet, the U.S. Navy’s history site has a page listing five of them. Only the last two (the WWII-era and current ones) sound at all familiar to me, though, probably because there have been many more movies and TV shows showing WWII (or later) radio communications than WWI-era radio. Their best-known feature is probably the use of niner for nine, which I assume is based on a clever insight: even if the consonants are lost in a bad radio connection, the vowels in the English words for the digits make them all easy to distinguish from each other, except for five and nine. From zero to nine, we have [i-oʊ], [ʌ], [u], [i], [oʊ], [aʲ], [ɪ], [ɛ-ə], [eʲ], and [aʲ] again. Tweaking nine to niner is enough to make them all distinct. Neat.

Radio alphabets have made their way into lots of military jargon over the years, and in some cases out into general English. For example, the nickname Charlie for Vietnamese insurgents came from the abbreviation VC (Victor Charlie) for Viet Cong. I hadn’t realized until I was researching this post that roger meaning ’OK’ came from the use of the old radio alphabet’s R to mean ’received’.

In closing, for a funny take on the way radio alphabets sound, I turn to no less a source than the early-90’s Top Gun spoof Hot Shots!. From the quotes page at IMDB:

Lt. Commander Block: Yankee Doodle Floppy Disk, this is Foxtrot Zulu Milkshake, checking in at 700 feet, request permission to land. Jim ’Wash Out’ Pfaffenbach: Roger that, Foxtrot Zulu Milkshake, you are cleared to land. Welcome to the Mediterranean!

Jim ’Wash Out’ Pfaffenbach: Alpha Velveeta Knuckle Underwear, you are cleared for take-off. When you hit that nuclear weapons plant... drop a bomb for me! Lt. Commander Block: Uh, Sphincter Mucus Niner Ringworm, roger!

If you want to see these in their original glory, somebody has uploaded all of Hot Shots! to YouTube in chunks (surely after writing to the studio for permission). The lines above occur at 0:25 in this chunk and 0:27 in this chunk, respectively. Enjoy.