What do you call it when, for example, you arrange by phone to rent a car, and the operator says
"Your confirmation number is H as in Harry..." What's the term for the H as in Harry part, and what are the some of the standard lists giving A as in Able, X as in X-ray, and so on?

In the Navy that was referred to as phonetic spelling and the alphabet as the phonetice alphabet. That and $5.00 will get you a cup of coffee at the next linguists convention.

Alfa
Bravo
Charlie
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
India
Juliet
Kilo
Lima
Mike
November
Oscar
Papa
Quebec
Romeo
Sierra
Tango
Uniform
Victor
Whiskey
X-ray
Yankee
Zulu

Faldage, do you by any chance know why Greenwich Mean Time is called Zulu time? It would seem more logical to call it Alpha time.

What's the phonetice alphabet?

... the guy who heads up the US Joint Chiefs of Staff?
The chief Chief?

Oops

Alfa's the next one east. They go all the way up to Mike (UTC+12) going east and Yankee (UTC-12) going west. Additionally Zild and Fiji are +13 and Kiribati and Tonga are +14. Go figure.

But there is a certain logic there; Alfa is UTC+1, makes sense in a certain way.

I think the Z is for Zero. Astronomers notate UTC (= GMT) as e.g. 0800 Z, for explicitness, whereas other time zones are 0800 +5 where the 0800 refers to UTC and the +5 is what's needed to convert to local time.

Reading of the Z as Zulu and the application of the Alpha words to other zones would then be secondary.

other time zones are 0800 +5 where the 0800 refers to UTC and the +5 is what's needed to convert to local time.

I think it might be the other way around. I don't know if anyone here still uses good ol' Pine for email. I do, and it stamps emails as follows:

hh:mm:ss (-ttt)

The hh:mm:ss is local time of the person who wrote it, and the stuff in brackets is how to translate their time to UTC. Anyway, I figured the guys who programmed Pine probably followed some sort of standard way of telling time across time zones. Maybe, or maybe not.

*Edit: I take that back. Everyone else doesn't necesarily WRITE in Pine, but when I read in Pine, that info is there. So the mail servers are the ones which stamp it like that, I guess.

I wasn't sure whether what I'd said was true, so I've tracked it down again. (I did once research this, and was going on memory.)

An overview of different time systems is at
http://sadira.gb.nrao.edu/~rfisher/Ephemerides/times.html

More detail is at
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part3/

Neither of those answers the question of timezone notation. But ISO 8601 does, and that can be found explained at
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

I'm posting this at 2001-08-24 12:12Z and my local time is 12:12 + 01:00 (meaning 1.12 p.m.) because we're on British Summer Time here. The Z does stand for "zero meridian", i.e. Universal Time (formerly called Greenwich Mean Time).

But yes, e-mails arrived postmarked at your local time (if you can get the jolly thing to work) so they use a notation effectively the reverse of that for local convenience.

Thanks for the ISO link. I skimmed it and concluded that the email stamp does follow that standard. It uses the version 9:47:00 - 02:30 rather than writing 12:17:00Z.