In school we learned long technical names for the notes of the (relative) scale: tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, leading tone, octave. It would take quite a while to spell out the tune of, say, the Irish Washerwoman in that scheme, especially if one tried to keep a straight face.

It is noteworthy that in the usual major scale the notes that are followed by a semitone interval (mi, ti) are the ones whose names end in i. Accordingly, one may name the chromatic scale do di re ri me fa fi sol si la li ti do, thereby accommodating songs with accidentals.