Matt Bors on the dark and awful .GIF wars

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Don’t miss the sequel!

The set-up, via his Borsness: https://medium.com/matt-bors/30172fbb335d

The Punchline:

Bd-eO0UCYAA_O7x.png501Ă—989 147 KB

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Where is the honor in pronouncing a word wrong?

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I never realized anyone didn’t pronounce it Jif.

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We should get Gillian Anderson and Gillian Jacobs in on this.

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I have never heard anyone pronounce it jif or gif, only ever dzjif.

I know in old English, g can sometimes mean j, but in modern English, it usually means dzj or g.

Also, doge refers to the elected duke of the republic of Venice.

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But that’s peanut butter.

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Since nobody is speaking up for the other side:

.gif stands for Graphics Interchange Format. Graphics, not jraphics.

EDIT: And .jpeg stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group.

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It’s cleaning stuff. Or it was until some moron renamed that to Cif.

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Jraffics?

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I’m a long-standing member of the hard-g crowd.

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This is what I tell my wife every time we have the .gif argument. She still doesn’t agree with me. It’s like the whole climate change argument, you can show them the science but they already believe something else.

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If you’re going to insist g, not j, on etymological grounds, why not take all those Latinate words beginning with c and insist c, not y, on the same grounds?

y is about as far from any actual pronunciation of these words as j is from that word, so it seems like a fair example. people pronounce gif with dzj, not usually g, not j/y, and celebrate with s, not usually c/k, not y.

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Pfeh. The day someone gives someone else a jift for their birthday is the day I’ll entertain that pronunciation.

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I thought that was Zif. So few letters, so much discord! :wink:

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Unrelated, the LZW patent threats on gifs, and the subsequent development of png, was how I learned about the potential software patents had to bite us all in the ass. Many web developers really thought they were going to have to pay a licensing fee or redo all their graphics over that nonsense.

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Now pronounce clique.

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I pwn a lotta pr0n.

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what
.

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Oddly, I’ve never head it pronounced “jif” by anyone in person. It’s always been Gif whenever I hear it spoken.

Who and where are these weird people who think it starts with a j sound, and do they pronounce .jpg as “gee-peg” to keep it balanced?

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