Reply #19: Easy identification [View All]

[Posteritatis]

It's the same reason phoenetic alphabets are used for a lot of things. You have a set of words that are very difficult to confuse with one another, which gives you something to work with more unambiguously over crowd noise, staticky radios, etc.

They're often quicker to say than "the First Lady" (there's situations where a quarter second is a big deal potentially), and more unambiguous than "Bush" ("Which one?!").

There's other sets that actually are genuine code words, but we don't get to hear those ones.