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Is it GIF? Or is it JIF? Someone should write a song! Oh look, someone did.
That someone is musician Jonathan Mann, who recorded this song “Don’t Say GIF” after GIF-inventor Steve Wilhit set the internet ablaze by announcing that his invention is meant to be pronounced “JIF”, like the peanut butter.
Is it GIF? Or is it JIF? Or does it really not matter?
[via Laughing Squid]
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Poor Mann (hurhur), he’ll have to join the club of the guys who created ‘wrath,’ ‘cache,’ ‘forte,’ ‘aegis,’ and so on and so forth. The can discuss the injustice infliced upon them whilst enjoying Cointreau and Chipotle.
That is what I thought. JIF then all the cool kids said Gif.
Here is a thought. LINUX is named after Lionel. I pronounce it LINE not lynne.
Linux is named after Linus Torvalds. His name is pronounced with a short ‘i’, as in LINN-us, and there’s a recording of him saying ‘My name is Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux LINN-oox’.
Great Jeorb Homestar
English rarely has any real absolute rules, at least ones that are consistently applied over the whole spectrum of the language. As I understand, pronouncing a G as a J is meant to indicate a “soft G”
With your argument, might I point out that Gaol is pronounced Jail and not “Gayle”
Although ‘g’ can be soft as in ‘gyroscope’ or ‘geology’, the first word of the acronym is ‘graphic ‘, with a hard ‘g’.
So, as Americans would say, ‘go figure’.
So how do we distinguish between Gif and Jif if we pronounce them both “Jif”?
The quicker we replace .gif’s with .apng’s the better!!
nah, it’s Jraphical Interchange Format.
God, that spelling looks as stupid as pronouncing it JIF, please let common sense prevail.
While I prefer GIF with a hard G, I don’t think it actually matters how the individual words are pronounced rather how the whole thing flows.
We don’t pronounce JPEG as “J-FEG” since the P stands for Photographic.
It’s a bit different though. P requires the H to be modified, G doesn’t require anything.
I’ll always use the hard G; because I certainly don’t say ‘jift’ (gift), and I’m pretty sure a T at the end of a word is not supposed to affect the first letter…
Also because of it standing for ‘graphics’.
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