Pick a shorter timeframe like one month, calculate annualized rate.

Then you'd say 'the S&P hasn't been going up at 7% recently'.

The pedantry hasn't been making you a more effective communicator recently.

Welcome to finance: if you're not being pedantic, you're probably trying to sell a lie. Verb tense absolutely matters.

Does anybody here believe aardvarkr was trying to sell a lie with their casual verb tense?

That's a bad idea, since equities have a lot of calendar events and a given month is never representative of a year's performance.

pick 3 months and try it.

I bet you’re fun at parties. The right way to phrase it would be to throw in a “YoY” but clearly you care too much to ever let someone on the internet dare to make such a pedantic mistake. Try contributing to the conversation instead of detracting from it.