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After reading Jason Eppink’s “A Brief History of the GIF”, I was pretty shocked to read about the debate regarding how GIF should be pronounced. While I see GIFs almost every single day, I have never once stopped to think about how the acronym is supposed to be said because I always assumed the ‘G’ in GIF would be hard. I decided to look around on the Internet to read a little more about this apparently raging debate.
Funnily enough, the first web page Google found when I searched “GIF or JIF controversy” was called “How to Really Pronounce GIF” (Find the website at this fitting url ). One of the first things visible on the web page is the line, ‘It’s pronounced with a hard G, “GIF”, like “gift”’. The website even offers the option for those who agree to buy t-shirts that express this view.
While there are a significant number of people who agree, as Eppink points out, the principal engineer of the GIF, Steve Wilhite, argues vehemently that the ‘G’ should be soft. In fact, upon being honored at the 2013 Webby Awards, he responded by announcing, “IT’S PRONOUNCED ‘JIF’ NOT ‘GIF’” (Eppink 301, link to full text here ).
While the debate rages on, it appears that the hard G pronunciation is more common, as a 2012 LA Times poll shows that people are close to twice as likely to pronounce the word with a hard ‘G’ (Link to LA Times poll here). And though the debate may seem a bit silly, it is something that has been widely debated amongst the Internet community for some time now. I think the following GIF sums up the debate pretty well.
So, one questions remains: how do you pronounce “GIF”??
Posted from Digital Studies 101 Blog by Patrick G.