The ‘Illiterate Boyfriend’ test

[Tigers!]

Have conditions between male and female reached such a state that this is happening? Admittedly I have been out of the 'market' > 30 years.

I am hoping it is satire but it does not appear to be so.

It does seem peurile to dump someone because they cannot spell or pronounce a list of words. Why those words and not others?
I thought spelling tests ending after school?
I suppose I should be glad that some people at least remember what they did at school.

 

[ZiprHead]

It always amazes me how many people I know who have difficulty reading, let alone know proper spelling.

My brother in law has a bachelor's degree in business and has a middle manager position in the large company he works for. Yet he was never taught how to write a proper business letter and came to my wife and me for help writing an important one.

 

[Elixir]

It always amazes me how many people I know who have difficulty reading, let alone know proper spelling.

My brother in law has a bachelor's degree in business and has a middle manager position in the large company he works for. Yet he was never taught how to write a proper business letter and came to my wife and me for help writing an important one.

When I was the recipient of poorly written comms, whether from a supplier, a customer or a prospective one, my avaricious reflex was to take advantage of them. My better self always prevailed, but only because I have known a couple people (one in particular) who never learned to read or write, and whose math skills were limited to basic arithmetic, but were nonetheless comfortably self sufficient.
Being taught valuable life lessons by examples provided by an utter illiterate, is humbling.

 

[thebeave]

It always amazes me how many people I know who have difficulty reading, let alone know proper spelling.

My brother in law has a bachelor's degree in business and has a middle manager position in the large company he works for. Yet he was never taught how to write a proper business letter and came to my wife and me for help writing an important one.

The arrival of email to the general public in the mid-90's exposed the horrible spelling and grammar of many family, friends and co-workers. Of particular concern was a cousin and uncle who were both teachers and a cousin-in-law who graduated from Villanova, but wrote as though he had a 6th grade education.

And yes, feel free to deconstruct my writing and point out all my errors. har har.

 

[Elixir]

Of particular concern was a cousin and uncle who were both teachers and a cousin-in-law who graduated from Villanova, but wrote as though he had a 6th grade education.

What sports did they excel at?
/snipe

 

[brewer]

I've heard of other unreasonable standards women are posting. Maybe they can find a nice incel.

 

[thebeave]

Of particular concern was a cousin and uncle who were both teachers and a cousin-in-law who graduated from Villanova, but wrote as though he had a 6th grade education.

What sports did they excel at?
/snipe

Yeah, good question. The CIL is not any sort of skilled athlete as far as I can tell. Now or before. He likes to brag, so if he was accomplished I'm sure I would have heard about it 20 years ago. His dad was actually a semi-famous tennis player in New York (played in the US Open many times), though, but he never followed suit. The only thing I can figure is it was a legacy admission or some back door deal.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Gore Vidal was talking about the death of linear type 40 years ago. Who can be surprised that people have vocabularies that derive from click bait, navel-gazing podcasts, TikTok vids, and the like? Who reads books, outside of the James Patterson spastic diarrhea that is built of paragraphs suitable for chipmunks? In waiting rooms, I'm usually the only one holding a book. Guess what everyone else is staring at?
In any case, if some guy --or young woman -- is asked to take an assessment before a relationship can proceed, there's a protocol.

She: I would like you to take this little assessment. It will ask you to pronounce a list of words.
He: Oh, sure. But I'll need a favor from you.
She: Such as...?
He: Would you agree to take the Dees Assessment for me?
She: Well, what does that consist of?
He (pointing) Dees nuts!!

 

[thebeave]

I've heard of other unreasonable standards women are posting. Maybe they can find a nice incel.

Yeah, there's a thing called "The three sixes" that's going around:

What Happens When Singles Follow the 6-6-6 Rule

Key points​

• The 6-6-6 rule sets six-feet-tall, six-figure salary, and six-pack abs or six-inch length as minimum limits.
• It's not clear how many women actually follow the 6-6-6 dating rule. But it is becoming a stereotype of women.
• Beware of using "women are too picky" as an excuse for dating woes rather than looking at what you are doing.
• The 6-6-6 rule can be a clear indication of superficiality, which can actually save you time and effort.

Women are going to have start lowering their standards when it comes to men. The prospects for marraige for young women in the very near future are rather grim.

 

[Politesse]

Hors d’oeuvres is easily one of the most commonly misspelled and mispronounced words in the English language, getting it wrong may be embarassing but it is hardly proof of illiteracy. And though I can readily guess at its meaning, I don't think I have ever encountered the word "diaphragmatic" before reading this article, and I would have to look up its "correct" pronunication, as either a voiced or silent G is plausible given the customary inconsistency with which American dialects handle borrow words from the Greek. I scored very highly on the GRE and passed the GWAR with flying colors, so not only am I officially literate, according to our local racists I am objectively a literary genius. A standardized test says so, after all.

It makes me wonder how many of the young women adminstering this test had to look up the answers before grading the results. I assure you, as a professional educator, than mispronunciations of "hyperbole" are not a phenomenon strictly found within one sex.

 

[Elixir]

Hors d’oeuvres is easily one of the most commonly mispelled and mispronounced words in the English language

C’est vrai! Quelle dommage.

 

[Politesse]

Hors d’oeuvres is easily one of the most commonly mispelled and mispronounced words in the English language

C’est vrai! Quelle dommage.

Borrow words, once they enter common use in a new language, are no longer really the property of their original tongue. Or if they are, nearly everyone in the country is pronouncing hors d'oeuvres wrong. The French are well known for their uvular fricative Rs, which most Americans couldn't produce correctly if they tried.

 

[thebeave]

Hors d’oeuvres is easily one of the most commonly mispelled and mispronounced words in the English language

C’est vrai! Quelle dommage.

Borrow words, once they enter common use in a new language, are no longer really the property of their original tongue. Or if they are, nearly everyone in the country is pronouncing hors d'oeuvres wrong. The French are well known for their uvular fricative Rs, which most Americans couldn't produce correctly if they tried.

I think most people have a joke name for hors d'oeuvres. We sometimes call them "horses ovaries". But usually we just say, "Bring out the Lay's potato chips, onion dip and Planter's peanuts!" and skip all the pretentious nonsense.

 

[brewer]

I think most people have a joke name for hors d'oeuvres. We sometimes call them "horses ovaries". But usually we just say, "Bring out the Lay's potato chips, onion dip and Planter's peanuts!" and skip all the pretentious nonsense.

Whore Dovers.

 

[pood]

All one needs to do is take a look at the headlines of Huff Post (others, too, but Huffpo is particularly egregious) to see how subliterate we have become. As ideologyhunter discussed, Gore Vidal noted this trend some 40 years ago, saying that while he was broadly liberal on most things he was fiercely reactionary when it came to the rise of audio-visual garbage and the decline of the written word. It is far worse now than it was then. The mass stupidity of the public may derive from the fact that no one reads, or even can read, anymore, apart from clickbait headlines and tiny nuggets of text. AI will just accelerate the spiral downward.

 

[bilby]

I assure you, as a professional educator, than mispronunciations of "hyperbole" are not a phenomenon strictly found within one sex.

I can pronounce it just fine, and I don't even watch American football.

 

[bilby]

My 89 year old dad was lamenting the fact that everyone today mispronounces "syndrome", which he was taught at grammar school in the early 1950s to pronounce as three syllables: /ˈsɪndrəʊmi/

Spellings and pronounciations evolve over time. There is no "correct" answer, only a "most popular" answer within a given language community, and more often than not, tests of "correctness" are actually tests for membership of a sub-culture, a tribe, or a social stratum.

As such, these tests are not differentiable from testing of knowledge of (the correct) popular cultural references. Or as Billy Bragg put it in his song Shirley, (which is about a working class man's relationship with a middle class woman) "How can you lie there and think of England, when you don't even know who's in the team?"

Reading, writing, and intellectual discourse used to belong to an elite. Near universal literacy has led to language purism as a way to ensure the continued dominance of that elite - once it was enough for membership that you could read or write at all, but now you must do so correctly - as defined by Oxford, or by Merriam-Webster. And of course, even these gate-keepers have to change with the times.

This sign (and others like it) were common on British railway stations until the 1950s:

 

[Elixir]

His dad was actually a semi-famous tennis player in New York (played in the US Open many times)

THAT is impressive (to me).

 

[Politesse]

I assure you, as a professional educator, than mispronunciations of "hyperbole" are not a phenomenon strictly found within one sex.

I can pronounce it just fine, and I don't even watch American football.

My claim was not that all people mispronounce the word, only that both men and women occasionally do; or to put it another way, that vaginas do not, in my experience, meaningfully prevent hyperbolic mispronunciation. As to whether or not you personally mispronounce the word in question, I would be quite surprised if our two great nations shared any clear common conviction as to its "correct" pronunciation to begin with. It has a few too many vowels for that to be hoped for.

Even in Greek, you're spoiling for a fight between modernists, Erasmisns and reconstructionist every time you hit an eta (the "y"). In rich kid grammar school, that's an "ey" sound. In modern Greek, an "ee". And historians debate between "ey" and "eh". So the original Greek pronunciation may well have been something like "Hepper Bow Lay". Which is all but unrelated to any "correct" English permutation.

 

[Politesse]

ˈsɪndrəʊmi/

English conventions have always been hell on the terminal eta found on so many Greek words. Applying French rules to a Greek problem. So poor Aristotle is rhymed with "Bottle", Aphrodite with "Flighty" and so forth.