Yeah, I Pitted “Syfy” and a few other offenders once before.
This time it’s the damn email spammers writing to tell me about a “Refi Notice”.
Look, asshole, I don’t conduct business with spammers anyway, and I’m also not trying to refinance a mortgage or anything else that one might wish to refinance. But that’s besides the point. Let’s just say, hypothetically, that some day I will be in the position of wanting to refinance something-or-other. And that I am therefore looking around and find your ad through my own searching, which would make it NOT spam. And let’s stipulate that I will not be aware that you folks have a history of spamming people when I do find your ad.
There’s still no way in hell I’d be doing business with you. Because you wrote “Refi”. You shortened the fucking word to “Refi”. That would (obviously) be a word that rhymes with “jeffy” or “stephie”. “Refi” is a pair of syllables that the word “refinance” doesn’t contain. You can’t possibly have any idea how fucking annoying that is.
You seem to be OK with “Sci Fi” as a shortened form of science fiction. I presume you pronounce this “Fi” the same way as in “refinance”? If so, why do you have trouble accepting that “refi” can be pronounced the same as the first 2 syllables of “refinance”?
Not to mention, “science fiction” actually does NOT contain the “fi” syllable.
You do know that these spammers didn’t make up this “cute” abbreviation, right? “Refi” is an extremely common abbreviation used by many, many people, even by those in the mortgage industry.
Well, I’m not with you on “refi” because how else would you spell the abbreviated word? “Reefy” has the same problem (rhymes with “beefy”), ree-fye is getting a little beyond the pale.
However. I grit my teeth whenever somebody drops a mic. Mike, okay, that’s how we managed to spell and pronounce it for years. I keep reading it with a short i.
ETA: Maybe “pretty common” is pushing it, but I’ve heard it often enough that it doesn’t draw my attention. I suspect I even pronounce it that way in rapid, spontaneous speech.
That’s probably the logical way to spell the abbreviated word, but the question is, what’s the desperate necessity for abbreviating it? Is the sender communicating over a vast distance in Morse code, so that every character saved is a major gain in communications bandwidth?
I’m with the OP in that the abbreviation is idiotic and unnecessary. It’s an attempt to be cutesy that just comes across as a lazy and unprofessional use of language. The “notice” part of “Refi Notice” adds insult to injury – i.e.- we’re going to use this stupid cutesy term and then add a lie to it, implying that this is an important notice from your financial organization instead of spam from a bottom-feeding douchebag.
A classic of prescriptivist idiocy. When it’s pointed out that you yourself have been quite content with an exactly analogous construction, rather than weaken your resolve, you determine that you yourself must have been in error, and must try harder to conform to the rule that you pulled out of your backside.
In the finance industry, refi (pronounced with a long “e” and long “i”) is very common.
However this week I received a request regarding “Resi finance” and I had no idea what it meant (I thought Resi was the name of a company). Some investigation revealed that the reference was to residential finance. I personally prefer to spell words out in their entirety for clarity, but there’s not much I can do about the way others conduct their business.
Well, just to confuse things further, the combination of letters r-e-f-i would in fact NOT be pronounced “reffy” as the OP implies.
Take a two-syllable word with a single vowel in the first syllable, such as “major” or “bunting” or “better” or “whining.” The vowel in these words can be either long or short. There’s no way to tell just by looking at the vowel. The way to tell is to look at the consonant/s following it. In general, if there is just one consonant then we say the syllable is “open” and the vowel is long. Thus, “major” with a long A, and “whining” with a long I. If there are two consonants, then the syllable is “closed” and the vowel is short. Thus, “bunting” with a short U, and “better” with a short E.
This accounts for the difference in spelling and pronunciation between “diner” and “dinner,” or between “baking” and “backing,” or between “hoped” and “hopped.”
Yes, there are some exceptions, but this is really pretty standard. So the “e” in “refi” should indeed be pronounced as a long E, as in “eat” or “see.”
The “i” in “refi” is a little different, as English words in general do not end with I. That’s probably the one to complain about if you’re looking for non-phonetic patterns. (Though compare pi, bi, Lady Di, and Hi!) But the E is absolutely within the rules.
–Ulf, who taught first/second grade reading for 10-plus years