Isn’t it a Hoot Your Boyfriend Can’t Read?

I accidentally stumbled across a trend on TikTok this week. It was one of women filming their boyfriends and husbands as they mispronounced various words. What fun! The girl'd written out a snazzy little list and then the guy got to read it out while she filmed his poor little face and laughed at him as he did so.

I have to admit, some of it was actually pretty funny.

There was this one guy who pronounced quinoa as “Quiznos”, which I suppose is at least a restaurant, but then he also mangled hors d’oeuvres as “whores divorce”, which, you know, is objectively hilarious. And another said challah as “chalet” and then pseudonym as “poo-suh-die-num”.

That one got eight million views, by the way...

But then, as all things on TikTok seem to do lately, a silly, inconsequential trend somehow transformed into a cultural thesis. These videos quickly became “another symptom of the male literacy crisis” and everyone started to weigh in on how tragic all these pathetic schmucks were who couldn’t read basic words.

Which, obviously, is when I got interested.

Just as an example of the general tone of how this discussion went:

“It appears some of your boyfriends don’t know how to read. You should ask them the last time they read a book.”

“This trend has unearthed a fear of mine that I didn’t know existed before this past week. The state has failed your man, and I’m scared.”

In next to no time, women were suddenly being advised to “either dump or immediately begin to get [your boyfriends] to start educating themselves.” And on Reddit, a thread went up titled “Why can’t Gen Z read?” which pulled in hundreds of comments.

So, yeah. Dump that illiterate loser because of quinoa.

It’s going to be worth spending a bit of time on what was likely to be causing the guys to make the mispronunciations. And, spoiler, none of it suggests that we’re seeing hordes of illiterate men who need to be fast-tracked to a remedial, single guy, reading programme.

First up, it’s likely these were words the guy’d only ever seen written down. Basically, once upon a time, he’d read the word, worked out what it meant, has been using it correctly in his own writing for years, but has never had cause to say it aloud before. James Harbeck calls these “book words,” while the educator Judith Wynn Halsted identified this as Calliope Syndrome, after the fairground organ every bookish child calls a “CALLY-ope.”

Essentially, because there’s no bag of pseudonym in the supermarket, we all have words that we understand perfectly well but don’t know how to pronounce. Mostly because we’ve never had to.

The second explanation for the error comes from the exact opposite place. This time it’s because the guy’s heard the word, but he’s never seen it written down before. For example, colonel. Because everyone’s heard “kernel.” That’s the dude in the white suit on a bucket of chicken. But the man in the video mispronouncing it will likely never have seen the printed word C-O-L-O-N-E-L and mapped it onto the sound he already well knows. (English took that spelling from the Italian colonnello in the 1580s but kept the pronunciation from the older French coronel. Because, you know, why not invent a language that’s as crazy to be expert in as possible? Just for the lols.)

I’m sorry to belabour the point here, but I hope you can see that this shows that there are two very good reasons for a mispronunciation AND NEITHER MEANS THE GUY CAN’T READ!

Thus, what this TikTok trend is actually measuring is the overlap. It’s identifying words a man’s seen both written down AND has heard said aloud. And even then, making a wrong guess isn’t the absence of skill. It’s the sound of skill being used, as Kuo and Anderson’s work on how we parse unfamiliar complex words explains.

Importantly, though, we need to remember that the more we read, the more print-only words we stack up. If we consume nothing more complex than the words the people around us say, we’ll never be humiliated like this. However, if we read widely, we’ll quickly build ourselves a vocabulary studded with landmines we’ve never actually heard anyone pronounce.

Here are six words to say out loud.

Awry. Epitome. Hyperbole. Segue. Façade. Misled.

If you got all six, congratulations! That means someone in your life has said them to you. If you fluffed one that’s most likely because you read it somewhere first. And that’s the entire diagnostic content of this trend.

In 1962 Dwight Macdonald, reviewing Thornton Wilder from a very great height, wrote the sentence that I think these videos are remaking: “I agree with everything Mr. Wilder says but I will fight to the death against his right to say it in this way.”

Because it’s obviously not about the content, is it? No guy being mocked on TikTok is being asked whether they know what pseudonym means. They do. Instead he’s being judged, like Wilder, on ‘the way.’

Way back at the start of June I wrote a piece about how the performative male reader was being shamed. We read in public, and we’re posers. And now here’s the follow-up! If we mispronounce a French loanword we’ve only ever read in front of a loved one, we’re a symptom of the male literacy crisis.

You know what? It seems to me there’s no right way for a man to hold a book...

Sources

Olivia Tauber, ‘TikTok has a new question: Can your boyfriend read?’, Mashable, 28 August 2026, syndicated via Yahoo.

James Harbeck, ‘Don’t be misled or go awry with “book words”’, The Week, 17 January 2022; Judith Wynn Halsted, Some of My Best Friends Are Books.

Li-jen Kuo and Richard C. Anderson, ‘Morphological Awareness and Learning to Read: A Cross-Language Perspective’, Educational Psychologist, 41.3 (2006), 161–80.

Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain (New York: Random House, 1962).

Etymology of ‘colonel’ from the Online Etymology Dictionary.