"Rod Speed" wrote in message
...
I've seen at least one example where the two locations were close enough
to be plausible, but far enough away to be dangerous.

Try:

///ashes.string.take

and

///ashes.string.takes

9 miles apart

**** house design using both take and takes.

Very much the case. Plurals and (near) homonyms should not be in the
dictionary. And even if they are, they most definitely should not be within
a few miles of each other - they should be a "stupid distance" apart so any
ambiguity or mishearing makes it very obvious which is the right one.


I still like numerical references (OS and lat/long) because you can relate
two locations: AB123456 and AB124456 are 100 metres apart in the east-west
direction, and AB123456 and AB123457 are 100 metres apart in the north-south
direction.

They are also public-domain rather than being proprietary, so they are
available, both for encoding and decoding, to everyone for free.

For premises (as opposed to road locations that are not in a built-up
areas), UK postcodes are a good way of getting to within a hundred metres or
so, apart from in sparsely-populated areas where the accuracy is less.
That's close enough to bring up a pointer on a map from which precise
directions can be given verbally.

I suppose the perfect system would include checksums so it is obvious if a
digit has been transposed or mis-heard, so the operator can ask again.

I taught myself the radio phonetic alphabet, which should avoid mis-hearing
problems (M versus N, P versus D versus T). Likewise I would emphasis the
difference between "fife" and "niner".