For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don’t want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That’s ludicrous!
That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use “less” when they should use “fewer”
If it were supposed to be pronounced “jif” it would have been spelled that way, I don’t give two fucks what Stephen Wilhite said about it either.
Agreed. I think since the “G” stands for “graphics” it should be pronounced like the G in graphics.
I always respond that in that case, “jpeg” should be pronounced “jfeg”.
But why? We don’t pronounce any other acronyms like that, so why treat GIF different? The U in SCUBA isn’t pronounced like it is in Underwater. The first A in CAPTCHA isn’t pronounced the same as in Automated and the CH isn’t split up to be pronounced like Computer and Human. The second A in NASA isn’t pronounced like in Administration and the I in PIN doesn’t get pronounced like Identification.
We read acronyms as their own words, not as a collection of the first sounds of each constituent word.
Tbf, you’re pointing out the vowels which make the sounds needed to pronounce the acronym as a word. But I get it, either way, we’re pronouncing the word as a standalone word.
Right in the same neighborhood… Jpeg (photographic)
Time to pronounce it jfeg lol
🤷 just cause?
Also, “gift”
Have any examples where the first letter of the acronym isn’t pronounced the same? (I’m sure there are some)
AWOL, OSHA, AIDS, ICE
UFO, not that that’s a super relevant question if we’re already admitting that our opinions are “just cause.” I think at that point the better question is “if just cause, why is there such a split in opinions?”
I think the reason GIF is so contentious is that if we can there’s a tendency to make acronyms sound like words if possible. FUBAR and SCUBA are pronounced the way they are because we’re trained from words like tuba to see the UBA and use a long U. Something like “oofo” (or “uh-fo” as you would likely argue) for UFO sounds like half a word, hence pronouncing the letters individually. The thing about GIF is that both pronunciations sound like a word, and so both feel valid enough that there can be a split in opinions. Any arguments one way or the other is just trying to justify a gut feeling about which way is “proper.”
To be fair, UFO is an initialism, not an acronym. But at the same time, if it was, I think it’d still be an example, because we’d likely pronounce the U like “oo” (as in “boo”), lol
Nearly all acronyms are technically initialisms
Nah, there’s plenty of both, even mixed in very similar subject matter. Example:
An ATM (initialism) takes a card then asks you for its PIN (acronym).
Same with Gnome wanting to be pronounced “Gah-nome”, or Latex “Latech”. Just spell stuff the way you want it to be pronounced, or accept that people pronounce it another way
Gnome is spelt the way they want it to be said. Are you suggesting that gnome should be pronounced ‘nome’ like the garden ornament with a silent g.
Is it not?
But they did! You’re the one who fucked it up by using an “x” (Latin letter x) instead of a “χ” (Greek letter chi).
(Also, you didn’t capitalize or format it correctly. It’s supposed to be rendered as “LAΤΕΧ”, and yes, those last three letters are
Τ Ε ΧGreek capital tau, epsilon, chi.)🤓
New hill: All brand names must be composed entirely of pronounceable characters from languages in actual use today
Um, I hate to break it to you, but…
Nuh uh
we all know it’s actually pronounced “yiff”
uwu
The thing is, that argument doesn’t really hold up, because g in English has two major pronunciations.
English being a bad language doesn’t excuse incorrect pronunciations. And if your argument was to hold any water, it’d be pronounced jraphics.
but g followed by i or e very regularly makes a soft g in English (and always makes a soft g in Italian, which is irrelevant I guess but I speak both). you may as well purposely mispronounce giraffe, gelatin, germ, Giorgio, giant, gentle, etc while you’re at it since it they don’t start with a j.
by english rules it very often is a soft g, but could be hard as well, but the creator has clarified multiple times it is meant to be soft, so why are people fighting it?
gift
pan / pang
hat / hate
clam / claim
one letter can and often does completely change pronunciation. i’d give you a good ol’ fashion makin fun of, but i actually think you could’ve gotten there if you would’ve thought about for a few more seconds. you seem pretty smart. shame you clicked reply too soon.
You’re on the wrong side of history, get over it.
in terms of how people refer to it these days, you may be correct that slightly more are using the hard g. what drives me nuts about the argument though is that the ‘hard g’ crowd does not have a good argument for it. the “g stands for graphics so it should be a hard g” crowd are immediately proven wrong that that’s not how any acronyms work. the “gift” crowd are immediately proven wrong as i just did above.
just be honest with yourselves. the only argument you have is “we just like it better”. if you were honest then i wouldn’t be able to argue against it.
Gift is by far the most commonly used word that is comparable, and it is a very close comparison, it makes sense people would base it off that. I’m a soft g person myself, but the one letter change doesn’t hold up very well here. All your examples have an additional letter specifically to change how another letter is pronounced using well established rules. That is not the case here at all.
Pan/pang- the g has a well established rule to change the pronunciation of the a? No it doesn’t lol. Words are not comparable like that in english, this is another terrible argument.
Examples: lead and lead, read and read, tear and tear, bass and bass, wind and wind. Spelled the exact same way and different pronunciations. Trying to prove how gif is pronounced based on the word gift just proves you haven’t thought about this for more than 10 seconds.
There is no grammatical argument for hard g. There is also no grammatical argument for soft g. Once again, g followed by i or e can be either in English. The only thing that should sway this is what the creator intended and straight up told everybody many times.
Also .JIF is already a file format and as far as I know, it’s pronounced, “jif” just like it looks. So if “gif” and “jif” are supposed to be pronounced the same way, then why do we even have the letter J? Fuck the letter C too while we’re at it, get a unique sound, you bastard letter.
https://fileinfo.com/extension/jiff
Oh wow that’s actually a really good point!
Now prepare for it to be dismissed! People are too dug in at this point, there’s no going back. The trenches have been dug.