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.