Who Is the Roger of ‘Roger That’?

On the list of guys immortalized in common phrases, it seems like the Roger of Roger that should be right up there with the great Scott of great Scott and the real McCoy of the real McCoy. But unlike those latter two expressions, which likely were inspired by actual people (though there are competing theories about which McCoy is the real one), Roger that is a reference of a different sort.

1. Alphabet City
2. Enter Romeo
3. One Small Step for Roger

Alphabet City

In the early 20th century, as wireless transmissions became more common, institutions devised phonetic alphabets to cut down on miscommunication over the radio. The first meaningful effort to standardize the practice across the globe came from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in the 1920s; this alphabet, seen below, primarily used city names. 

The ITU’s First Global Phonetic Alphabet

But plenty of organizations, the U.S. military among them, still stuck with their own code words for years after that. The U.S. Army and Navy teamed up to create a joint alphabet in the early 1940s, and upon entering World War II, they realized it would make sense for U.S. and British forces to use the same one. While it’s often said that Britain simply adopted the U.S. military’s alphabet—officially the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet—there’s more to the story than that.

In 1942, the U.S. military enlisted Harvard University’s Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory to help them develop the ultimate phonetic alphabet with the most intelligible and least confusing words. So the laboratory’s researchers analyzed a list of 250 terms compiled from various phonetic alphabets (as well as some of their own previous research) and made their recommendations. By the end of the year, leaders from both countries were under serious pressure to hurry up and finalize their selections so the system could be implemented.

According to a 1959 technical report written for the Air Force [PDF], “It is reported that after carefully evaluated decisions had been made on most of the alphabet, there still remained several words on which neither the U.S. nor the British side would yield. Therefore, the Generals and the Admirals went down the list taking first a U.S. and then a U.K. preference to complete the list and get on with the war.”

Enter Romeo

This alphabet, widely known as the Able Baker alphabet after its first two entries, features Roger for the letter r [PDF]. It’s not surprising that it made the cut: Not only had the U.S. already been using Roger—the Navy in particular since 1927—but researchers had identified it as one of the most intelligible options for r. Evidently, the generals and admirals liked it better than another high performer, robust, and the British military’s go-to, Robert.

World War II–Era Able Baker Alphabet

It didn’t take long for Allied fighters to start utilizing Roger as shorthand for received. Contrary to popular belief, the term didn’t confirm any action on the speaker’s part—it really just meant “message received.” If the speaker intended to follow a given directive, they might say “Wilco,” short for will comply, or “Roger wilco.”

The Able Baker alphabet was very English-centric, though, which made it ill-suited for global use (though that didn’t stop the U.S. Weather Bureau from using it to name hurricanes for a few years). So in 1956, NATO and the International Civil Aviation Organization rolled out another alphabet that’s still in use today. While a handful of words from Able Baker remained the same—e.g. Charlie, Victor, and X-ray—Roger was replaced with Romeo.

Current NATO Phonetic Alphabet

One Small Step for Roger

By that point, however, it didn’t really matter: Roger meant “received” to soldiers whether it was in the official alphabet or not, and they kept on saying it through later conflicts. It’s unclear when Roger that first gained popularity, but it was definitely in play during the Vietnam War. 

As for how the expression made its way into the wider English lexicon, military jargon often does: Soldiers come home and assimilate their slang into civilian life. (World War II also gave us honcho and eager beaver.) Not to mention that we’ve seen decades’ worth of World War II depictions in film and television, many of which feature Roger in context. Plus, the term isn’t just used by the military—it’s also common among others involved in radio communications, from truckers to commercial pilots.

But there might be another reason Roger is so widely understood by the general public: because people around the world heard it countless times during broadcasts of the Apollo missions. An estimated 1 billion people tuned in to Apollo 8’s Christmas Eve message of 1968; and some 650 million people watched Apollo 11’s moon landing the following summer.

The most memorable line from the Apollo 10 mission in May 1969, the so-called “dress rehearsal” for the lunar landing, is Thomas P. Stafford’s “You can tell the world that we have arrived.” What Stafford said right before that was “Roger, Houston. Apollo 10.” By the time Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in July, surely no viewer was still asking who Roger was. (Except maybe as a joke.)

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