I’ll be very disappointed if his tombstone doesn’t have an integral solar-powered screen showing GIFs 24/7.
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I understand the point that people are making, but I will point out that most of these exceptions to the rule are borrowed words.
Frankly, it’s an acronym, and there are no rules (not that English doesn’t have a million exceptions to every damned rule anyway) that define how acronyms are to be pronounced. SCUBA is pronounced like it is despite the U standing for “underwater,” which, by the silly "rules"I keep seeing (“it’s graphic, therefore must be a hard G”) would make it “scUH-ba.” And why is NATO “Nay-toe” instead of "Nah-To, when the A is clearly short in Atlantic?
And if the G must conform to the first word, why is GAD said with a hard G, when the G stands for Generalized which has a soft sound? GOP is said with a soft G, but it’s Grand with a hard G.
There are no rules to this, folks. People are just making them up so they have an excuse why they say it that way. They could just SAY it that way and say they prefer it, it makes as much sense and is a perfectly valid reason. Many folks didn’t know the connection to the peanut butter brand or how it played on that famous commercial (“choosy programmers choose gif”). It’s fine.
But don’t sit there and make up new rules that don’t exist to explain it away, as if everyone ELSE is saying it wrong by saying it the way the creator intended.
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A friend of mine was his cousin. He only discovered today that Wihite was the creator of the GIF.
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Right?
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Personally I pronounce it “dot-gee-aye-eff” to avoid getting into fisticuffs.
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oh no
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As pointed out though, this would give you some odd pronunciations in cases like SCUBA and NATO though. To me the most telling thing is that people are always like “gif or jif”. They could disambiguate by writing “ghif” but somehow nobody feels the need to.
Unfortunately the rule itself was borrowed from French. Trying to get rid of foreign parts of English is only going to leave you a strange German-sounding language.
…Then again, maybe that’s the best answer.
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And I agree, so by your own rule (well, guideline—we’re talking English here) it’s pronounced “JIF”.
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I reconcile the two pronunciations like this:
GIF pronounced with a soft G is an image file format created and named by Stephen Wilhite.
GIF pronounced with a hard G is what Facebookers and Instagrammers call any small memetic image, regardless of the actual image file format used.
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I can’t tell if you’re being serious but that’s NOT HOW ACRONYMS WORK! If you’re going to add extra letters to an acronym to make a word you need to keep the original letters capitalized and the new ones lowercase like “CHiPs”
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Some times the Creator can be wrong, though.
Exhibit A:
Brainspore is right.
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Ah, darn it. Worst kind of brainfart. I meant hard, not soft.
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That means Greedo was shot with a laser, soft s, right? I mean, it’s not ztimulated emission of radiation. 
Look, just for the record, language is defined by use. Which means this is like arguing over the proper way to say zebra or schedule. I know most of them are jokes, but I feel like a hundred posts in somebody should mention the truth…they’re both right.
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But that is not the rule.
“…the sound of a soft ⟨g⟩ (typically before ⟨i⟩, ⟨e⟩, or ⟨y⟩)…”
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Wouldn’t that be pronounced /ˈfɪf/ as in ghoti?
