It is the same rule for those things too, literally. Names have been mispelled/mispronounced and changed over the years.
It's not like NASA, which is an actual active institution.
You're wrong.
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Whose fault is it that people think the G in GIF is pronounced like Give instead of Gin?
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It's not like NASA, which is an actual active institution.
You're wrong.
I thought about mentioning this yesterday. never, ever, ever heard anyone say "sexy" for that.
SQL as "ess cue ell" or "sequel" also stands out. Everyone I know in tech says "sequel'." I jokingly refer to it as "squeal" occasionally.
First, so we're clear, pun = a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words which sound alike but have different meanings.
The .GIF pun stems from the motto used around CompuServe at the time: Choosy Programmers Choose GIF. They were intentionally referencing the peanut butter when they decided on the pronunciation back in the late '80s. Like... that was the point. So when folks say, "JIF is a peanut butter!" the response from the (correct) Soft-G advocates should be: "YES. EXACTLY."
Puns are delightful, because they're bad. Do it for the puns.
:)
OP, you freaking blew my mind I never noticed Dwyane Wade is spelled that way wtf!So the person who developed the format and name for it made it to be a soft g like in gin or giraffe. But someone on the internet mispronounced it in their head as people often do for Pokémon or such, and spread it around. This made it popular to say GIF with a hard g like gimmick.
Now, I know it's become a meme to say to originator of the name is wrong about his own chosen name. So now dictionaries say both are acceptable. But still, why did the one that isn't actually accurate to the name made by the inventor gain traction?
It's a name for a tech format, and as a name it has the pronunciation it's inventor gives it.
Battle Over 'GIF' Pronunciation Erupts
When the man who invented the GIF, the widely used Web graphic, said that people were pronouncing the term wrong, it started an unexpected debate.bits.blogs.nytimes.com
You're not gonna go tell Dwyane Wade he says his name wrong. A name is pronounced the way the parent chooses. If one person says "Eesabelle" and the other person says "Izabelle" but their names are spelled the same, you pronounce it as they introduced it and as their parents chose.
First, so we're clear, pun = a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words which sound alike but have different meanings.
The .GIF pun stems from the motto used around CompuServe at the time: Choosy Programmers Choose GIF. They were intentionally referencing the peanut butter when they decided on the pronunciation back in the late '80s. Like... that was the point. So when folks say, "JIF is a peanut butter!" the response from the (correct) Soft-G advocates should be: "YES. EXACTLY."
Puns are delightful, because they're bad. Do it for the puns.
:)
Ah, I didn't think of that as a pun by itself, just part of a pun.
In which case I prefer "Beware geeks bearing GIFs." :)
This was popular joke on USENET around 1990 as far as I can remember. That link about that claims that everyone pronounced it with a soft G until later is just wrong. I was working in a multimedia-focused computer store in the late 80s, and at the University of Michigan (a pretty huge tech hub) in the early 90s, and hard-G was the way virtually everyone pronounced it. Whatever the author's intent, it hadn't spread along with the format itself, and seemingly most people took to hard G. Another poster above mentioned Austin was a soft-G town, so I imagine their were local norms. Based on the current usage and adoption of hard G, I would guess that tracks with how it shook out early on, as well.
For fun, here are the same arguments being made nearly 30 years ago.
groups.google.com
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How does one pronounce GIF?
groups.google.com
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He didn't invent a word, he invented a file type and named it, you can't take control away from his name. You can only say it wrong.
After he invented it, he no longer has any real say on how people use it or what people call it. If he didn't want people to mistakenly pronounce the name with a hard-G then he should have spelled it differently. If he didn't think about it beforehand, then it's his own damned fault.
Right on the money. When you have to intentionally misspell it in order to convey its supposed "true" pronunciation then you have no leg to stand on.
We pronounce 'scuba' as we do because of 'tuba', when confronted with new words and acronyms we look to other words of a similar nature as a guide(by 'jif' logic we should be saying the 'u' like 'underwater'). So 'gif' is 'gift' minus a 't' and anyone arguing otherwise is being moronic.
No, 'ROM' is 'Tom'. Nice try, though.
If you were trying for a gotcha you should've went with 'NASA' and 'Nasal'.
Languages may have all sorts of rules, even a mess of a language like modern English, but new words can get in any way, shape, or form and you can't police them after the fact. And 'Gif(t)' has always been 'Gif(t)' until the dunderheaded creator of it tried to pass off his stupidity as gospel, arguing otherwise is revisionist bullshit.
The English speaking world overwhelmingly decided it was a hard g, so the creator can go pound sand. People can keep calling it JIF if they want, but I feel like the majority of people who insist on it do it so they can feel superior for pronouncing it the "right" way.
I'm not going to change the way I pronounce the word just because the creator wanted it pronounced a certain way. Fuck that guy, he can't tell me what to do!
The fact that this site exists alone is more than enough reason for me to never change the way I pronounce gif.
I think it matters less how it's "supposed" to be pronounced and more that anyone who argues about online, either way, is wrong.
This is a nice backfill of an explanation, but it's not really consistent at all with plenty of other intialisms.
Really, the answer is "it's English, there's no ultimate arbiters, and people just love fighting about inconsiquential stuff on the internet."
I like the hard G, myself, especially as it avoids any confusion as to what I'm talking about.
I bothered reading it, and it bothered me.
This passage is absolutely bonkers:
It's the goddamn English language. If it's in dictionaries, that means it's common usage and it absolutely is right. They don't intentionally add wrong words, they add words, pronunciations, and additional meanings as they surface in English through use. Yes, we can be pedantic and I've certainly got a bone to pick with people who use literally instead of figuratively, but at some point you're arguing against a lost cause. Language is fluid, and (again) there are no ultimate arbiters of the English language.
People say it with a hard g because they know how to read English and making a new word doesn't mean you just spell it however you want
This sounds about right lol
Society collectively decided the meaning and pronunciations of words. And i think it's pretty clear that a hard G is accepted by a significant portion of people, if not the majority
I learned the "JIF" pronunciation back in the day from my older brother who was no doubt familiar with its admirably nerdy origins.
But I have since given up the jhost. Language Is fluid, and just as "literally" morphed to encompass its exact opposite meaning, things change once the masses have their unwashed way with them.
That said, you don't have to like it.
But I have since given up the jhost. Language Is fluid, and just as "literally" morphed to encompass its exact opposite meaning, things change once the masses have their unwashed way with them.
That said, you don't have to like it.
Hard g "gihf" just sounds wet and noodly. We pronounce it "gin" for a reason," "gihn" would just sound terrible.
For people with good taste in linguistics, there's only one option.
For people with good taste in linguistics, there's only one option.
My biggest annoyance is that web development has used gifs as a crutch since nearly its inception, and, having started web development in the late 90s, I've been using the term gif (and pronouncing it correctly for the time) for 20 freaking years. More recently as gifs exploded in popularity to use not as a technical tool but as a way to post dumb memes the unwashed masses are trying to force a pronunciation change to make themselves feel correct. I still pronounce it the correct way in my head but almost go out of my way to say it out loud because of you dummies.
Using this logic it's me-me or may-may and not meme.
Also I'm sure it's mainly Americans using hard G and America has no say over proper English.
The G is for Graphics and he chose to pronounce it like the peanut butter to make a reference.
Scuba is not a reference to another previously existing product. The creator was making a reference. You can ignore the original intent, that's fine. But you'd be wrong based on historic fact
spell this out G Y M
Ok So if enough people mispronounce your name, they are right and your parents are wrong?
That website claims to be dismantling all the arguments, but it doesn't dismantle a very common argument, and IMO the most convincing one, which is that there are no words in the English language that start with a G followed by a vowel and an F that are pronounced with a soft G. It's not like "gift" is the only one, there's words like gaffe or guffaw. Imagine if Geoff was written Geff. Instinctively, you'd pronounce that with a hard G, would you not?
