Ask Lemmy

You might be familiar with the radio term "roger." Per the FAA's Pilot/Controller Glossary, it means "I have received all of your last transmission. It should not be used to answer a question requiring a yes or no answer."

They want to make it VERY clear that roger does not mean "yes." So why do we use the word "roger" to mean "acknowledged"? Because Americans in World War II.

First of all, radio was still a fairly new warfighting tool in the 1940's. In a lot of cases, they still used Morse code tapped out by telegraphers on straight keys. Morse code was like the SMS of its day, it takes a long time to spell each letter out, so you end up with abbreviations, some of which really only make sense if you're familiar with Morse. For example, you know the radio practice of saying "over" and "out?" In morse code, you use K (-.-) to mean "over" and KN (-.- -.) to mean "out." There's an entire list of "Q codes", for example, you can tell someone to reduce their transmitter power by simply transmitting QRP (--.- .-. .--.). There's one that means "what's your barometric pressure?" because aviation. You'll still sometimes hear "What's QNH?" in aviation circles.

Most relevantly, a reply that simply means "I have received all of your last transmission" is simply abbreviated to R (.-.).

They also had AM voice mode radios. And now we get to talk about phonetic alphabets. We've all independently invented one at least once, talking to tech support on the phone and reading a serial number "One Three Four D as in Dog, Two, E as in Egg, Seven Eight one." Because a bunch of letters sound the same when saying them out loud. You might be familiar with the modern one used by NATO, also required by the aviation world via ICAO. Starts out Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta etc. R in the modern one is Romeo. But NATO formed well after WWII.

The phonetic alphabet used during WWII by English speaking nations went Able Baker Charlie Dog Easy Fox etc etc. Peter Queen Roger Sugar etc etc Xray Yoke Zebra.

So we say "Roger" because in WWII the Morse code abbreviation for "received" was R and the letter R would be pronounced "Roger" on an AM transmitter, and even though the phonetic alphabet has moved on, the word remains in use with a specific definition.