O wad some Pow’r the jiftie jie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
– Robbie Burns, To A Louse (corrected)
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It definitely always sounded like “jif” in the olden times. It makes an initial sound just like in giraffe, gin, gaol, gibbet, gem, etc.
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Is there some graph we can plot this on?
Did I say that right?
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… then wouldn’t it sound more like zhif? For some reason, I have never been able to remember which one is which when people refer to hard and soft “g” sounds.
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Au contraire, my jammed up friend. May you be cursed, so that, in future, everyone’s breath you smell is peanut butter breath! (Yuck.) I recently bought a bottle of Skippy in order to compare it to Jif. (Both were the creamy kind.) The Skippy was much too sweet. The Jif had a robust peanut butter flavor.
(And I will be looking for this Jif bottle.)
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The joke is that, like ‘str’ or ‘fsck’, it belongs to a domain where words don’t have pronunciations. People who pretend to care how to pronounce ‘gif’ simply mark themselves as toe-curling eternal-september noobs.
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Even more pointless than you thought, because language is up to those who use it; the hard “g” won long, long ago.
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I knew the file extension GIF was pronounced like the peanut butter name intuitively the first time I saw it in the 1980s. I later found it interesting that the creator of the format also pronounced it that way. GIF with a hard g will always sound GOOFY to me.
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YES!!! Hard G WINS!!!
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Do they have an extra-oily line of peanut butter? I need to stock up for Burn All Jifs day.
I’m pretty sure that was the intended joke, my friend.
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Pronounced “joofEH.”
It’s French in origin, you see.
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That would certainly help explain their fascination with Jerry Lewis o.o’ .
Just gonna point out that when people who say it with a soft G want to type a comment describing how they pronounce it, they spell it with a J instead of a G. If they really think it should be pronounced with a soft G, then why write the wrong letter?
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Gary could decide how his name is pronounced. Gary’s parents could not, once Gary is out in the world for himself.
Anyway, a personal name, reinforced every day by the holder, is not comparable to the name of a file format.
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I will take up doing just that, starting today.
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