I never know how seriously to take the 'American education policy taught everyone to read wrong' claims, since nothing I've read about it really nails down how widespread the offending method is/was. But I can say that, when you watch a lot of youtube videos that involve people using scientific latin (that is, videos about plants), you do become uncomfortably aware of how many people (especially people under a certain age) are either unwilling or unable to sound out a long unfamiliar word, even if the pronunciation is very phonetically straightforward.
But I can't blame any education system for the fact that they apparently don't feel the need to, say, look up the difficult word and how it's pronounced before making and publishing a video about it. That's on them.
Anyway, shout out to Dr. Frieda Billiet, the woman who identified the now-popular houseplant Philodendron billietiae, to which she gave her name, and whose contribution to botany and especially the houseplant hobby (billietiaes rule, they're great plants) gets stomped on a little more every day by youtubers who cannot be bothered to think for 10 seconds about any word they don't already know.
Even though she has personally told them so.
The thing about scientific latin is that it's not like historical latin. It's pronounced exactly the way an English-speaker using english phonics would imagine it is. You really just need to sound it out! It's long but it's not complicated! Just like the beautiful leaves of the Philodendron billietiae!
