But when speaking, having phonetic distance between related words helps prevent confusion. In a noisy environment, you can mishear just the first consonant in "

But when speaking, having phonetic distance between related words helps prevent confusion. In a noisy environment, you can mishear just the first consonant in "NoCal" and get "SoCal". With "NorCal", you have to mishear multiple phonemes. This phonetic distance/information redundancy is built into the NATO phonetic alphabet. It's also one way that linguists explain "chain shifts" in speech sounds.