My pet theory is that spoken English and written English are two different languages that kinda translate between them.

In spoken English, “I read books.” doesn’t have ambiguous tense.

Unless they have a father with a PhD in English who acts like an English teacher with them their whole childhood.

I loved my dad, but boy did it suck when I showed him some piece of creative writing I wrote and he got out the red pen.

One of my buddies is in his fifties. He’s been an avid reader his entire life. He pronounces “chasm” with the ch of “chicken” no matter how much we correct him. I’ve known him long enough for that word to actually have shown up in conversation a not-insignificant number of times.

Thanks to Hugo’s House of Horrors, a childhood of peh-nuh-lope for Penelope

Names from other languages I think are especially obvious for the self taught or avid reader. Euler, Goethe, Camus, etc