Exactly. The listening party doesn't need to have knowledge of the NATO alphabet to still benefit from it since they are just regular English words.

I once had someone sound out a serial number over a spotty phone connection years ago and they said "N as in NAIL". You know what sounds a lot like NAIL? MAIL.

And that is why we don't just arbitrarily make up phonetic alphabets.

> saying "letter as in word" for each letter

Which often just confuses things further.

Me: My name is "Farb" F-A-R-B. B as in Baker.

Them: Farb-Baker, got it.

"M as in Mancy."

Right but it's not much more useful than any other phonetic alphabet the other party doesn't know, including the one you make up on the spot.

If you're me, it's still useful because the ones I make up on the spot aren't great.

"S-T-E-V-E @ gmail.com, S as in sun, T as in taste, ..." "Got it, fpeve."

I dunno, there's a pretty good chance that the one that people spent time and effort designing to replace earlier efforts with the goal of reducing potential ambiguity and for use over noisy connections with expectation that mistakes could cost lives is probably better than what you improvise on the spot