A certain company attempts to clear up confusion, but an animated debate is likely.
Next up, a clarification from Spam?
Heh. I was not aware that anyone pronounced GIF as “jiff.”
Not only does a hard G make sense due to the fact it comes from “graphic,” the word also looks like “gift” without the final T.
I’d like one of those “Giphy” peanut butter jars, but suspect they are unlikely to make it all the way to Hawai’i.
It’s been an argument since the graphics format came out.
It also looks like “gin” with an “f” instead of an “n” at the end. (And it doesn’t matter what the “g” stands for – the resulting acronym is pronounced as most people think it should be pronounced based on how it looks. After all, the “u” in “SCUBA” stands for “underwater,” but surely you pronounce it as an “oo” in the acronym, not as an “uh” as in the word it stands for.) Now, it does seem more people analyzed it as “gift” without the “t”, than “gin” with an “f” instead of an “n” at the end.
I said it as “jiff” when I first encountered it, as did about a fifth to a quarter of the people I knew back in the late80s/early 90s. I still reflexively say “jiff” (which happens to be the pronunciation preferred by the creator), but I try to say it with the “g” as in “gift” these days as that’s the pronunciation most people have settled on.
This gives me an idea for an exciting new game: Computer file format or airport code?
For instance
PDF - file format
PDX - Portland (Oregon) International Airport
JAC - Jackson Hole Airport, Wyoming
JSP - File format
PNS - Surprise, it’s both!
The creator of the format does.
The peanut butter was a deliberate reference - he would say ‘choosy developers choose gif’, referencing Jif’s ‘choosy moms choose Jif’ ads.
Not like clearing this confusion up is going to solve all the problems…
Really? Interesting. I hear “jiff” in my head, but it’s rare that I say it out loud or hear anyone do the same.
I once used Bold detergent on a t-shirt with writing on it. The lettering got darker.
We can only pray for the day that a format without such troublesome pronunciation issues rises up and finally consigns GIFs to the dustbin of history. If only they had thought to put the letters in reverse order. We would have had smooth sailing using a Format for the Interchange of Graphics, outside of a few annoying fruit-based puns.
Thing is, that’s already happened. And I don’t mean superior but rarely used formats like APNG. I mean that, these days, most “GIFs” are actually video files, like MP4 or WebM. Even the GIF hosts out there convert to these formats. Heck, some allow “GIFs with sound.”
It hasn’t stopped people from calling then “gifs.” It just is the word for a short, usually looping animation now. Heck, I know people who didn’t know it was ever used for static images.
As an aside, I work with text subtitle files a lot, and one program for making them is Substation Alpha–they chose for their files the extension .ssa. Later, they developed a more flexible format that they chose to call Advanced Substation–.ass.
[Moderating]
I had thought previously that this was about the peanut butter, which, being food, is a Cafe Society topic (yes, I pronounce the two the same, which prevented me from noticing the distinction in the title). But it’s really not, so it’s a better fit for MPSIMS. Moving.
As long as you don’t pronounce PNGs as Ping.
…
…please?
And if I had posted this to MPSIMS, it would have been moved to CS because it was about food. Some times you just can’t win here.
I’ve known about the “soft g” thing for a long time. But aside from a (very) few pedants, no one I’ve known says “jif”.
As to the thing the OP links to: gifs are just images with the capability of (limited) animation with or without looping.
It’s like defining smart phones as things that track your exercise.
And, of course, there are a bunch of “animated gif” web sites that serve up mp4s and such! So a lot of “gifs” on the web aren’t gifs.
I say GIF with a hard G mostly to annoy my kids. (It does make more sense to me to use a hard G)
And King Canute (or his courtiers) thought he could stop the tide.
Most people pronounce it with a hard “g,” so he’s just an old man shouting at clouds.
And if you bring up the “rules” for a hard G, I’ll show you a finger.
But that is the more usual pronunciation, if by “hard g” you mean the “g” in “gift.” (Which is usually what I hear referred to as a “hard g.”)
There doesn’t seem to be any sort of rule or guideline. For every soft-g “gin” and “giraffe,” there’s a hard-g “gift” and “girl.” If anything, the “hard g” seems to be more common with “gi-” initial words. I think it all comes down to what your initial instinct is–whether your brain happens to analyze it with “gift”/'girl" vs “gin”/“giraffe.” Mine happened to be the latter when I first encountered the word, so that’s how I pronounced it for years until popular usage pushed me to pronounce it with a “hard g.”
IPA note: “Hard g” refers to /g/ here, and “soft g” refers to /dʒ/ here.
You and others keep insisting that the hard g is what most people say but show me some evidence. I’ve been in software since 1983 and it took over a decade before I ever heard your so-called default pronunciation.
You like hard g, fine. Just shut up with the “it’s the norm”. It’s not.
Love live the gin and ginger loving giraffes!