Petrarchive – Illiterate Boyfriend test

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No.11984 Anonymous 2026-09-03 17:40:32
Illiterate Boyfriend test
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You can pronounce them all, can't you anon?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/03/boyfriend-literacy-intelligence-test

From the original video:
> thyme
> epitome
> challah
> gnocchi
> fuchsia
> conscientious
> faux pas
> hors d'oeuvres
> colonel
> sorbet
> queue
> connoisseur
> opaque
> niche
> regime
> pseudonym
> hyperbole

In some sense this feels like yet another example of women inexplicably L-posting and not even realising they're doing it. I almost feel like screaming at my screen: don't you see that if you choose to date a guy who is stupid there's only one person to blame for that? Also it makes me mad because I can read all those words (was a bit unsure on challah, but I guessed right by analogy with chutzpah) and I'm ultra single.

But in another sense, and I think the article sort of talks around this without really hitting on the crux of it, what this represents is the same trend as the 'Golden Retriever bf' - the need to invent a new cultural idiom to justify and normalise relationships where the woman is better educated than the man. Men have traditionally gotten away with having dim-but-slim trophy wives, on the principle that it's a natural desire for a man to have a partner that is beautiful and that intelligence is not a necessary attribute in a woman if you can support your family single-handedly. Now it's women who are in the situation where they're picking men on looks not brains and so a patronising cultural script needs to be written to conventionalise this. 'Trophy husband' is maybe a bit too on-the-nose, but 'dumb but in a loveable way, and handsome' seems to be the emerging archetype.
No.11985 Anonymous>>11986 2026-09-03 18:02:07
No one knows how to do anything in the attention economy, but post rage bait or incite infighting and they won’t stop until it no attracts views and discussion. Smart-dumb pairs and double dumbs will have harmonious relationships, but a smart pair will have power struggles; ancient societies knew this but had more tactful ways to express it. This is just media women bragging/NLOGing that they are the “smart” ones in the relationship, unlike midwit becky and airhead Stacy, and broadcasting it at their partners’ expense because the are insecure. Actual smart women will hype up their dummies’ positive traits like being ridiculously good looking, sensitive, handy, artistic, talented etc.
No.11986 Anonymous 2026-09-03 18:11:01
>>11985
you don't need to hype up someone who is good looking. it's self evident.
No.11987 Anonymous 2026-09-03 19:09:49
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This is one of those things where the current conversation about it is only bubbling up into the mainstream because they framed it from the 'progressive' and 'right' side of the gender war. You can find just as many videos of this online of women being illiterate. The women claiming their boyfriends just have 'dyslexia' are also probably in this group, but the algorithms aren't smart enough to edit self-owns out of the videos yet. The counterexample is not what these algorithms are designed to show women, and what the algorithms are designed to show men is regressive and dumb and bad. Do you think The Guardian is going to post articles about how it's a good idea for guys to give their girlfriends intelligence tests?
No.11995 Anonymous>>11997 >>12002 2026-09-04 00:40:38
Another Yank problem which doesn't exist outside of the country
No.11997 Anonymous>>11998 2026-09-04 00:58:08
>>11995
I do wonder if all of these posts come from one of you bongs obsessed with the GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH or whether all of you are truly this ass-blasted.
No.11998 Anonymous>>12003 2026-09-04 01:03:18
>>11997
Hold on, I've got my bingo sheet ready:

- Europoors
- Thirdies
- ESL
- Fix your countries
- Muh GDP

And you, cross-eyed, prepared for this thread to be about foids! Now you have to shift gears and hiss at foreigners on your "American internet" (a site created and hosted by a British guy in Denmark). Come on, I'm waiting.
No.12002 Anonymous 2026-09-04 08:18:14
>>11995

The bleakness is too spiritually to bear
No.12003 Anonymous>>12004 2026-09-04 08:31:20
>>11998

Bro YOU WIN god damn. I SURRENDER
No.12004 Anonymous>>12008 2026-09-04 08:53:05
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>>12003
No.12006 Anonymous>>12007 >>12036 2026-09-04 10:39:10
love how midwits think that knowing how to pronounce "epitome" and "hyperbole" is somehow a mark of intelligence. but seriously all of these are extremely common words, how could anyone not know how to pronounce them??
No.12007 Anonymous>>12009 2026-09-04 11:39:25
>>12006
It's not a mark of intelligence necessarily as it is a signal of interest and cultural proximity. Some of these are not a mark of English literacy at all, such as "challah" or "gnocchi", which are Jewish and Italian words respectively. That's why I immediately identified it as an American article despite it being in The Guardian (an author from LA instead of New York would have put "tortilla" and "adobo" presumably). In effect they are social and class delimiters much more than they are about education. In fact this is supported by the related phenomenon of English learners knowing what words mean but, having learned from reading and not listening to others, often mispronouncing words (Anna has an anecdote about this, I believe, and I similar ones). It's why the author specifically made pronunciation her standard. There is something a bit more subtle going on here than simply "dumb boyfriend".
No.12008 Anonymous 2026-09-04 11:54:07
>>12004

Yes I AM seething! I'm malding! Is that what you want to hear?? Anything to just make it stop
No.12009 Anonymous 2026-09-04 12:09:26
>>12007
knowing how to pronounce difficult words is linked to literacy though, because you are likely to learn them first by reading, and them link them to their pronunciation later on. also many of these words are 'difficult' to pronounce because their pronunciations rely on some knowledge of foreign orthographies, which is a mark of education and of literacy (and also of class, of course).
No.12020 Anonymous 2026-09-04 20:11:37
I always heard not to judge people based on not being able to pronounce words they say since it shows they learnt them from reading rather than conversation. Foids mad at their own problems, typical stuff.
No.12022 Anonymous>>12028 2026-09-04 22:40:19
When I took a long ahh IQ test they asked me stuff like who wrote Alice in Wonderland and what "palliate" means so I assume there's some solidly founded correlative stuff here
No.12028 Anonymous 2026-09-05 04:03:05
>>12022
IQ tests work on the principle of setting you tasks that correlate with 'g' the statistical factor of general intelligence. They're not supposed to be fair, exactly, in the sense that they're not supposed to be able to infer that you're a mega genius even if for some reason you've never had access to books or culture.
No.12029 Anonymous 2026-09-05 08:58:51
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)#Mutualism
>The "mutualism" model of g proposes that cognitive processes are initially uncorrelated, but that the positive manifold arises during individual development due to mutual beneficial relations between cognitive processes. Thus there is no single process or capacity underlying the positive correlations between tests.
>During the course of development, the theory holds, any one particularly efficient process will benefit other processes, with the result that the processes will end up being correlated with one another. Thus similarly high IQs in different persons may stem from quite different initial advantages that they had.
>Critics have argued that the observed correlations between the g loadings and the heritability coefficients of subtests are problematic for the mutualism theory.
No.12036 Anonymous 2026-09-06 03:07:01
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>>12006
The Wordsum test is used as a quick proxy for IQ in surveys. It consists of 10 multiple choice vocabulary questions. It's correlated with full IQ test scores at about 0.71.
I don't think it's really that surprising that vocabulary size is correlated with IQ. You can tell who's dumb and who's smart based just on how they speak and write (for instance, I speak and write like a dumb person). People who are more intelligent probably show interest in more advanced and varied reading material compared to their duller peers starting in childhood, which lets them acquire a larger vocabulary.
No.12160 Anonymous 2026-09-08 20:32:24
There is something very malicious about articles like this.
No.12162 Anonymous 2026-09-08 21:13:01
This is less about being illiterate and more about not knowing words with foreign origins and very few occurences in real life. I got all them except for challah and gnocci, because I have had neither and have heard multiple pronunciations used for both.
Functionally I am far, far above the average. I just don't always feel like communicating in the most pompous way imaginable 24/7.