Ok, so this has been doing the rounds here for a while already, but I’ve just been tardy in getting it onto the blog for the rest of the world to see.
There’s clearly great news when it comes to the recent achievements of South African learners in their exams this year:
Sadly, the people doing the captions at SABC News aren’t the South African learners of this year, and that’s why they’ve spelled “levels” incorrectly.
Now there’s a serious point to make here: I certainly don’t ridicule people because they don’t speak English well. It’s very likely that, with 11 official languages, it’s not their first language.
However, in an organisation as large as SABC News, there will be someone whose first language is English, and there should also be someone whose responsibility it is to make sure that whatever goes on screen is spelled correctly.
And therefore, it’s absolutely fine to take the piss and laugh at this really unfortunate error.