Tuesday, October 20, 2020

It’s Pronounced GIF



The internet has been arguing about the pronunciation of GIF (graphics interchange format) for years. Honestly, does it really matter? I have never had the word come up in conversation using voice, only in text. But the debate leads us to another, broader topic: who gets to decide how a word should be pronounced? The person who coined the word may have a strong opinion, but the word will be pronounced the way most people actually say it. And what causes people to pronounce a word in a certain way? Tom Scott has some thoughts on the matter.



3 comments:

Debra She Who Seeks said...

I started out pronouncing it with a hard G for quite a while but now I've gone over to the dark side and pronounce it with the soft G. So I see both sides!

Anonymous said...

Choosy people choose Gif.

Bicycle Bill said...

I suppose there are some good people on both side, but so far as I'm concerned, it's pronounced with a hard 'G', since the word the 'G' represents (graphic) is also pronounced with a hard 'G'.

-"BB"-