In POTUS, it would not be possible to pronounce the T as it is pronounced in the original word, as it is part of a two-letter symbol.
I could take exception as well to SCUBA, based on my personal experience that it is not usually spelled in all caps, and many people don’t even realize it’s an acronym. The second O in YOLO is part of a diphthong, and actually is pronounced in the acronym as it is in the original word, if you parse the diphthong.
But I’m just going to stick with “I didn’t say ‘always.’”
Anyway, those are actually good examples of my original thesis-- the reason that GIF is problematic is that there are to ways to go in deciding how to pronounce an acronym: how is the letter pronounced in the original word? and, what spelling rules govern the new word that has been formed? Neither rule has primacy.
Come on-- if the rule always applied, it wouldn’t be English. This is the language where “though” doesn’t rhyme with “bough,” “trough,” or “tough,” but it does rhyme with bow, go, sew, doe, and whoa.
Lots of words start out as acronyms then simply become words through repeated use. As you sorta-said, SCUBA / scuba is one. LASER & RADAR are two others. Substantially nobody treats those as anything but ordinary nouns now. They look downright weird fully upper-cased as I wrote them for contrast.
In scientific/technical conversations, my experience is that its pretty seamless for parties to use “Gig-uh-hurts” and “Jig-uh-hurts” and even switch back and forth. However, it seems there are some that insist on “Guy-guh-hurts”.
I had two coworkers when I worked in the Midwest. Dawn Sanderson and Don Sanderson (last name changed). Worse still they were in identical jobs in the same territory. We had to agree that Don would have to revert to Donald, which he hadn’t been known by since elementary school.
I (having lived most of my life in Illinois) hear and say a distinct difference between “Don” and “Dawn.”
As one might expect from this map I found a couple places online.
One that I used to encounter more often was kilometer – kill a meter, or calommiter? I think more and more people have realized that if it’s kill a gram, kill a watt, and kill a calorie, consistency dictates that it can’t be calommiter, but kill a meter instead. But I used to get into arguments with folks about it.
Similarly, I thought the proper pronunciation of JSON was ‘J-sahn’ until I saw a video in which the creator of the JSON file himself said the proper way to say it is just like the name ‘Jason’.
My dialect started out as purebred SoCal. I cannot imagine anyone from that part of the country saying or hearing that Don & Dawn sound the same. I really wonder about the validity of that map.
I did something similar in a high school history course, referring to Peter the Great as “an enlightened despot.” I used a silent T for the last word, though, having never heard it said aloud before and assuming it followed the same rule of pronunciation as “depot.”
According to Wikipedia, Larry Boucher, the main developer of SCSI, “intended (SCSI) to be pronounced “sexy”, but ENDL’s Dal Allan pronounced the new acronym as “scuzzy” and that stuck.” I wonder if Larry continued to pronounce it “sexy”.
That’s interesting. I’ve worked with literally hundreds of hardware and software engineers, and I’ve never heard anything other than gig-a-hurts (and gig-a-byte), except from Doc Brown.
In southern Indiana, which is to say, below the Indianapolis met area, there is a pin = pen merger, to the point that pens are called “ink pens,” to distinguish them from a safety pin or dressmaker’s pin, or whatever.
It took me a long time to figure out why people always said “ink pens”-- what other kind was there? I thought at first maybe an ink pen was a fountain pen, or something, and a “pen” was a throwaway ball point, but nope. I haven’t even see a fountain pen for sale in the midwest.
I am not aware of this being anywhere near a “rule.” Coincidence, sure. Acronyms generally end up pronounced how the finalized word looks like it should be pronounced in English. What the constituent letters stand for is largely immaterial.
Think BDSM. Floggers and canes, beds of nails, nipple clamps, and the like. You might not be getting off on the protocol, but did you stop to think about the jollies experienced by the folks foisting it off on us?
I know software professionals who say “ahss” for OS and “earl” for URL, but I’ve never heard a soft G in giga-anything, in 43 years in the business, fwiw
