Women are giving their partners the ‘Illiterate Boyfriend’ test: ‘Do your best to pronounce these words’

Are they though?

Or is it just bullshit rage bait staged viral content slop?

Words not pronounced using traditional phonics just become an exposure test - i.e. has this person heard this word. Ironically, reading them in absence of hearing them, will not help someone pronounce them correctly.

Per an example in the article, I have never heard of the word "challah" (a Jewish bread) and thus would have pronounced it with a traditional ch sound (note - the c is actually silent).

Literacy rates may be a genuine concern, but this "trend" test is really assessing exposure, and, at the end of the day, is just content slop.

Tiktok really brings out the worst in humanity...

Ridicule your boyfriend test*

If someone uses a word out loud that is mispronounced it’s a sign of literacy.

It means that the person read rather than heard the word and knows its meaning.

I thought that canapés was pronounced “can apes”

WTF is this article? This is not about literacy. When you read a book, it usually doesn't tell you how to pronounce the word.

Literacy is about understanding, not pronunciation.

What is this sexist rubbish? Swap the genders and the same journalist runs it as manosphere misogyny

Some of the words, fair enough if you haven't heard them before, no judgement.

But I've seen a few videos, and it's like the boyfriend wandered out of a fucking cave.

Was listening to the TV news a couple of years ago and heard the reader say:
epi-TOME.
I was like: 'epi-TOME'? Took me a few seconds to realise.

The problem is that pronunciations change very rapidly over time, so what is phonetic today will not be in 100 years. One of the reasons we can still read Shakespeare from the middle ages, is that due to the invention of the printing press, English spellings haven't changed that much. If you keep "updating" the spellings you risk making historic English unreadable in a very short time and needing translations of books only 100 or 200 years old. This will not help literacy in the long term. Just make reading historic texts more difficult. 

I'm going to ignore the clickbait trash article about a (adding another "trash" here would be superfluous) TikTok trend, and instead focus on the point of the post:

You are unironically taking an equivalent stand to the one Kevin made in the office:

why waste time say lot word when few word do trick

The growing percentage of people in society unable to pronounce these words (all of which an educated English speaker in the western world should 100% be able to pronounce) is entirely down to decreased prioritisation of properly funding public education.