Your post looks interesting and might well be 100% correct but I don't know - nor do I know anyone who knows - what the various little pronunciation guides or whatever they're called mean. It's why people tend to say "car as in carpet".
This "'foo' as in 'bar'" stuff is worse than useless most of the time, as you've just been shown.
Plenty of people understand IPA.
> No, "car as in character" is still.
It's still completely incomprehensible unless you know which vowel sound is meant, which is the whole point of this sub-thread.
"Plenty of people" is misleading. Plenty as in thousands, millions of people worldwide, possibly, not not plenty as a percentage of the english people world. I'd be surprised if more than 5% of english speakers look at an IPA description of a sound and do anything other than go "what the fuck does that mean?".