SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Peanut butter brand Jif has put forth their opinion on how to pronounce GIF.
From their website(warning, lots of animated GIFs):
When is it OK to call a Gif a "Jif"? Never.
Jif® is peanut butter. GIFs are
looping animations.
SNACK ON THAT.
That would be all well and good except for just one thing. The person who actually created the format, Steve Wilhite, explicitly stated GIF was to be pronounced with a soft "G"!
From a 1997 edition of the NetBITS newsletter, down near the bottom of the page appears:
It's "Jiff" and I Don't Want to Hear Another Word -- Logic may dictate the "g" in GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) is pronounced hard, like gift or gefilte fish, but that didn't stop dozens and dozens of readers from offering opinions, many of them hilarious.
However, several people wrote to say that they either worked with folks at CompuServe or read the original GIF specification, all of which specified a soft "g". None of us at NetBITS understand why we haven't seen the definitive word before, so here it is. Charlie Reading <charlier@kreber.com> writes:
I worked with the creator of GIF (Steve Wilhite) when I was still employed by CompuServe. Steve always pronounced it "jiff" and would correct those who pronounced it with a hard G. "Choosy developers choose GIF" (spinning off of a historically popular peanut butter commercial).
An article at Ars Technica actually queries professional linguists in pursuit of the ultimate answer.
See this Sesame Street-like GIF which mentions popular words that start with a soft G such as Giant and Giraffe.
Lastly, here is a short video (1m18s) with what is quite possibly the strongest affirmation of all. David Karp presents Steve Wilhite with the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award at the 17th Annual Webbys where Steve dramatically uses a GIF as his acceptance 'speech' and sets the matter straight once and for all.
Not that it settles anything. The debate will rage on like vi vs. Emacs.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 27 2020, @02:13PM (3 children)
Christ, really? That's terrible. All this time I've been using a Microsoft-ism? Now I want to wash my mouth out with soap.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Thursday February 27 2020, @04:40PM
The SOAP standard was created by Microsoft.
Microsoft saw XML-RPC (or whatever it was then called) and thought they could build something far more complex to replace it.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2020, @09:18PM
SEQUEL was the original name for SQL back in the late 60s and early 70s when IBM created it. People who started with SQL early on in the 70s and 80s (mostly enterprise types) or learned from them in person (so that way they could hear how they pronounced it) are more prone to the "SEQUEL" pronunciation, instead of the initialism, because of this.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday February 28 2020, @12:17PM
You can skip the mouth washing as it's definitely not a Microsoft-ism. I think it's changed to be more "es-queue-ell" over time, but for many years, I heard both pronunciations at about 50/50. I, myself, still pronounce it like "sequel" and nobody's corrected me yet.