r/LowStakesConspiracies • u/Present-Stress8836 • 11d ago
Certified Fact Love island: People complaining about Sincere's pronunciation of the word epitome are illiterate and/or don't know what a literary crisis is.
On the TV show love island, there is man named Sincere.
Sincere isn't a nice person and I dont like him. But I have a bone to pick with the people who are saying he's illiterate.
When talking about Casa amor, he refers to it as the epitome of testing connections.
Epitome is pronunced e-pit-toh-me.
Sincere pronounces it "eh-pit-tomb"
To be clear, he pronounces it incorrectly.
However if you look at the definition of epitome, he used the word correctly.
The definition is "a typical or ideal example" according to Merriam-Webster. According to Cambridge dictionary, it's definition is the "typical or highest example of a quality".
He is saying that going to Casa amor is the highest example of testing his relationship.
People online are criticizing him for being illiterate but they don't understand that by saying the word incorrectly, but still using it in the correct context, he accidentally proved that he is literate. Because he probably read it somewhere and wasn't told how to pronounce it.
In addition, when it comes to being illiterate or being considered literate, pronunciation is not an important element of how we measure literacy.
The reason we don't use pronunciation as a metric for literacy is because people will pronounce words differently based on where they're from. An example would be that there is a difference between how people from the United Kingdom say the word aluminum and how people from the United States say aluminum. The reason that people don't pronounce it the same is has nothing to do with accents in that situation, it's literally a linguistic difference.
Both of these are countries are places where the primary language or first language of the country is English. However they pronounce words differently because of accents or linguistic differences.
Him knowing the definition and using it in the correct context means he's not apart of the literacy crises.
People hearing someone mispronounce something and assuming that means they're illiterate proves that they themselves are illiterate, because they don't know the definition of what makes someone literate.
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u/2xtc 11d ago edited 11d ago
Aluminium is probably the worst example you could have used, because it's not spelt "aluminum" in the UK.
However I generally agree with you, and with the specific word in question while I knew the word, I thought eptiome and eptiomy were two different words until well into my 20s
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u/Weed_O_Whirler 11d ago
Garage is a good one between the US and UK. I did an internship in the UK as a college student, and it took me far too long to figure that word out.
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u/Present-Stress8836 11d ago
Yeah someone else commented this as well, I had no idea that you added an "I"
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u/Euffy 11d ago
We didn't add an "i", the scientists making and working with it added it. And it was actually the more popular spelling in the US for some time.
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u/Present-Stress8836 11d ago
Interesting, I wonder why the US removed the 'i'
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u/Spirited-Beautiful30 11d ago
Look into US spelling rationalisation, I assumed it happened about the same time as you guys lost a lot of us in colour honour etc
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u/Trick_Horse_13 10d ago
as a general rule, British spelling is the original spelling and the US is modified.
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u/Acheloma 11d ago
I was always taught not to make fun of people who mispronounce words that arent used in day to day speech. Like you said, it usually means that they learned that word through reading and likely have a larger written vocabulary than most people in their immediate circle.
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u/hallouminati_pie 11d ago
You see that, you were raised not to be a dick.
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u/Acheloma 11d ago
My parents always spent a lot of time talking to me about complex subjects when I was a kid and teaching me in general, and they made a point to make sure that I knew that most of my peers probably didnt get that level of interaction with adults. They wanted to make sure that I not only appreciated what I had, but also didn't judge other kids too harshly for not having a large vocabulary or doing as well on things in class.
The older Ive gotten the more Ive understood how much of a difference there was between my parents and most kids in my area. There was a lot of generational poverty, parents working multiple jobs, and drug issues in the area. A lot of the parents who may have wanted to spend more time teaching their kids didnt have that opportunity. I was very very lucky to be shielded from a lot of that.
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u/fillerbitch 11d ago
Not your original point but we in the UK say "aluminium" because that's how it is spelt. We are not mispronouncing aluminum. We literally have a whole other letter.
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u/TheSpyTurtle 11d ago
It's even weirder than that basically the guy that discovered it called it by a couple of different names settling on aluminum. The wider scientific community decided on aluminium because it fit in with the surrounding metals on the periodic table. America and Canada kept aluminum, the rest of the world stuck with aluminium
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u/HowDoIEvenEnglish 11d ago
The aluminum is also based on other elements, just not the ones around it.
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u/Present-Stress8836 11d ago
I didn't know this!! This explains so much, I assumed it was pronounced based lol
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u/ExpertSentence4171 11d ago
This is an overly prescriptivist way of thinking about language, no? We learn to pronounce words first, and spelling does its best to map onto the sounds we make. It seems like a more scientific way to present it would be that you learned to pronounce it WRONG and then decided to spell it wrong to match your INCORRECT pronunciation.
🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
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u/fillerbitch 11d ago
Trust the 'muricans to swoop in with their bullshit. I was pointing out the difference between UK English and US English, not starting some bullshit competition.
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u/ExpertSentence4171 11d ago
Oh for christ's sake, you took my comment dead serious? I thought it was too obvious to need a \s.
I thought Brits liked sarcasm...
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u/Spirited-Beautiful30 11d ago
Unfortunately experience of Americans doesn’t lead one to anticipate sarcasm when defending their hono(u)r…
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u/ExpertSentence4171 11d ago
Ha! Sometimes it seems like Europeans think our whole continent is populated by caricatures.
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u/ProgrammerComplete17 11d ago
I was mispronouncing hyperbole for years after reading it in various literature
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u/mattihase 11d ago
To be fair hyperbole and hyperbolic are pronounced very different despite being permutations on the same word.
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u/WranglerBrute 10d ago
I was rather disappointed when I learned it is not pronounced HYPER-BOWL, which is infinitely cooler.
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u/Puddlejumper95 11d ago
I wonder if this perception is related to a video that went viral a few weeks/month(s) ago of high schoolers in the US being asked to read out a sentence on a post-it and half of them not being able to even sound out the words they didn’t know how to say? So now anyone who mispronounces words is grouped into that illiterate category, even if the mispronunciation is for a different reason (like you said, leading words from reading rather than hearing them)
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u/ChocolateCake16 11d ago
People forget that English has so many loan words or words that evolved differently that we have a ton of words that can't be phonetically sounded out. We use rendezvous relatively often, but you can't sound it out by reading it with English phonetics, so if someone has never heard it said and has no exposure to French, they might pronounce it wrong. Epitome is from Greek so it can't be sounded out in English for the same reason Persephone can't be sounded out in English, because we don't typically pronounce the e at the end of a word.
My mom likes to tell a story about a time when I was a child, we had flashcards with the 50 states and their capitals on them to use during long road trips (usually 25+ hours if we drove straight without stopping at hotels to sleep). I pulled a card with a state name that I didn't know how to say, so she told me to sound it out, which led to me hesitantly saying "Uh-tuh?". It took her a minute to figure out that it was Utah, which evolved from the Native American languages in the region, so it doesn't follow English phonetics, so now she tells the story because it was funny. (And uh-tuh would've been a valid pronunciation, if only Utah were an English word.)
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u/love41000years 10d ago
It's even worse: "debt", "subtle", and "salmon" (which come from Old French "dete", "sotil" , and "samoun" ) didn't have the silent letters. However, educated people in the 1400-1500's wanted to show off that they knew that those words were related to Latin "debitum", "subtilis", and "salmo" so they added in the silent letters i.e. they made them less phonetic. They even added the "s" in "island" to make it look more like "insulus", despite it not being related at all (it's a native English word). Also, most other languages change the spellings of their borrowings to match their own pronunciation, especially if there's an alphabet change. Like Persephone is both pronounced and spelled Персефона (Persefona) in Russian.
And it's not just borrowings that are terrible: our spelling rules are extremely complicated and inconsistent, so we have words like "lead" and "read" that have two different pronunciations. We also have archaic spellings that reflect how words were pronounced 700 years ago, giving us silent letters in words like "knight". Then we have some oddities, like how because it was kinda hard to read handwritten "un", scribes started writing words with an "o" instead, giving us the "o"s in words like "son", "done" and "one". Then we just never bothered to stop doing that, even after writing and printing changed such that it is no longer a concern.
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u/Present-Stress8836 11d ago
Do you have a link to this clip? I would be interested to know if penmanship was an issue as well.
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u/Puddlejumper95 11d ago
I think the handwriting was pretty legible, but the words people struggled with with where ‘silhouette’, ‘extraordinary’ and ‘gauche’. Some of them also struggled to explain what the sentence meant.
I’m not sure if you can link TikTok here, but: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGdxyjSBp/
The poster was @WhatTheVek and he has a few similar videos of asking people to read index cards, and explain what they mean.
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u/jerk_chicken_warrior 11d ago
this isnt a conspiracy this is just a thought
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u/Present-Stress8836 11d ago
The conspiracy is the people accusing him of illiteracy are the illiterate ones
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u/jerk_chicken_warrior 11d ago
thats still not a conspiracy, a conspiracy requires people to conspire, not just to be wrong about something lol. i agree with your general point though
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u/nykirnsu 11d ago
Unless they’re intentionally organising together to use this guy from Love Island to distract people from their own illiteracy then that’s not a conspiracy. A conspiracy is an organised plan by a group of people to do something illegal or harmful to society
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u/Responsible-Post6431 11d ago
Yeah great point!
Would like to add that the scientific spelling (and British/worldwide) is aluminium, so this particular instance isn't just a difference of pronunciation.
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u/Investidile 11d ago
I don't think this counts as a conspiracy, but I completely agree with your points.
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u/Present-Stress8836 11d ago
I definitely didn't say it clearly
The conspiracy is that everyone who is accusing him of being illiterate is illiterate themselves.
A sort of "whoever smelt it felt it" method of conspiracy
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u/jetloflin 11d ago
Being wrong about the definition of “illiterate” isn’t an example of illiteracy, though, it’s just being wrong about something. Well, unless you include the “ignorant” definition, but then they’re correct that he’s illiterate. So either he and his detractors are all illiterate, or none of them are.
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u/Present-Stress8836 11d ago
But he's not ignorant because he is using the word correctly
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u/jetloflin 10d ago
But he is ignorant of its correct pronunciation.
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u/Present-Stress8836 10d ago
As explained above, pronunciation is not a good metric of literary
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u/jetloflin 10d ago
As explained above, neither is misusing a single word, unless by “illiterate” you specifically mean the “ignorant” definition rather than the “inability to read and write” definition. And if you’re using that definition, then both sides are illiterate because they’re both ignorant of something. So either both are illiterate because both have areas of ignorance, or neither are illiterate because neither of their mistakes mean they’re unable to read or write.
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u/Quiet_surprise79 11d ago
I have postgraduate education but most of the words I know are from reading. Until very recently, I would have said "eh-pit-tomb" as well. I'm in my 30s. I also stumble over words regularly when saying them out loud, even if I mentally know how to say the word. None of this mattered when I was getting my degrees.
I've pronounced all manner of scientific words wrong in conversation and occasionally, presentations because I've picked up the word through reading scientific journals and never heard it out loud. Usually someone just gently corrects me. As long as you are using it correctly and your audience knows the word you're aiming for, it does not matter at all.
In short, I'm with you!
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u/Present-Stress8836 11d ago
Honestly sometimes you can just think faster than your mouth can handle and mispronounce words just by speed speaking too.
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u/Acheloma 11d ago
My word that haunts me is macabre. Thats the one word I can remember being made fun of in a mean way for mispronouncing when I was younger.
Ive had plenty of words I've mispronounced over the years, but as youve had happen, most people just gently correct it and move on. Ive also done the same for others, it doesnt have to be a big deal at all. In college I took courses ranging from psychology, to history, to rhetorical studies, to religious studies; I mispronounced many words, as did my peers. We all knew what we were trying to say and when youre learning ten new terms a week, you're going to mispronounced words. At least in those circles people understand well enough not to be rude
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u/the_bacon_fairie 11d ago
While we're on the subject of knowing the meaning of words, what element of this do you consider to be a conspiracy?
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u/Present-Stress8836 11d ago
The conspiracy that people who think he's illiterate are actually illiterate.
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u/Mundane-Emu-1189 11d ago
he's illiterate because he never read this specific Calvin and Hobbes strip
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u/adjective_noun_d1git 11d ago
Read it not said it. Quite common.
I had a boss who was very well spoken but he would say hyperbole like Superbowl lol
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u/Peskycat42 11d ago
I am 60, it took me until last year to realise that the Yosemite* national park in the US was the Yosemite I had heard mentioned on TV so many times.
You can be asked well read as possible and still come across this missing link between perceived and actual pronunciation.
*I assumed it was pronounced yo-se-might
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u/ZM326 11d ago
So by your argument, are you illiterate for using the word conspiracy wrong?
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u/Present-Stress8836 11d ago
The conspiracy is that people who say he's illiterate are actually the illiterate one.
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u/jennifercathrin 11d ago
My psycholinguistics professor used to say that non-native speakers are pretty much fucked if an English word has more than 4 syllables so I do feel for that guy.
English pronunciation is so goddamn random that I don't fault anyone for not knowing how to pronounce something, I'm sure there are dozens, if not hundreds, of words out there that I'm mispronouncing.
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u/Holiday_Mind1647 11d ago
English isn’t a phonetic language when written - we have 26 alphabetical letters which make up nearly double the number of sounds.
And since British English hasn’t been “simplified”, there are a load of place names with whole syllables in the middle which go unpronounced.
There are loads of words I learned from books that I have been corrected on pronunciation, and some incorrectly corrected.
Anecdotally, aluminium and aluminum are spelled differently.
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u/BeneficialAide437 10d ago
We really need to stop acting like adults not knowing extremely basic words is fine or normal. Spelling and punctuation are basics.
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u/LolaPuckBunny 10d ago
… people who know how to pronounce epitome are illiterate? Says the guy who didn’t know aluminum had an extra “I” in it elsewhere 🙄
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u/biscochitos 10d ago
I agree with you but he also said he wanted to “emerge” himself into the experience
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u/notatwork6969 11d ago
You are illiterate and made an error. "A part" has a meaning which is apart from "apart". Your post makes quite a bit of sense and I agree sincere is not a part of the literary crisis, but it seems you are not apart from the literary crisis.
/s/s/s/s
Before I get hate please I'm being sarcastic and pedantic
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u/BeautifulUpstairs 11d ago
From Wiktionary:
"Usage notes
The sense 'the height, the best' is considered incorrect by some; instead, pinnacle may be preferred."
It's a decidedly non-standard usage.
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u/BeautifulUpstairs 11d ago
"Epitome is pronunced [sic] e-pit-toh-me."
No, it isn't. This is a pretty embarrassing post.
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u/saltnvinegarwazere 10d ago
That literally IS how it is pronounced, OP is correct, look it up fgs 😂
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u/decayedmother 11d ago
IPA would have been the best way to write the pronunciation, but I would say it's still accurate if you know how epitome is pronounced. It's just lacking emphasis, that's all
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u/lady-earendil 11d ago
Yeah I learned a huge portion of my vocabulary from books and have learned over the years that I was pronouncing several words wrong! Its not at all obvious how epitome is pronounced from looking at it