The author references "I... A... S... India, Alpha, Sierra", and I immediately recognized those as words from the <i>NATO Phonetic Alphabet</i> [1].<p>I have found it to be a wonderful tool when I need to spell out loud. Now that I have the alphabet's acrophonic words memorized, I no longer fumble to create words on the fly that match the target letter. Plus, there is no second-guessing by the listener, since the words in the alphabet were selected to reduce ambiguity.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet</a>