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TIL When you hover over a piece of the phonetic notation on (English) Wikipedia, it shows you an example for its pronunciation
(sh.itjust.works)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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This was only a controversy because GIFs were falling out of favour and the format's creator decided to stir up shit.
Reminds me of the stuff with Harry Potter. "Oh wait Hermione is Black, Dumbledore is gay, oh and trans women aren't real women." It's just to get people talking about something that has run its course... and oh look, a new Harry Potter series coming to HBO. Because it works.
The actual pronunciation of GIF doesn't matter. We say GIF with a hard G because the G stands for Graphics and that has a hard G. Some say it with a soft G because that makes it sound like Jif and they like peanut butter...? I guess? I doubt it's because someone said that's how it was meant to be pronounced. Honestly I think Jif sounds better, but that doesn't mean it's right. I prefer the English pronunciation of garage (rhymes with carriage) to the American (rhymes with barrage) but in the States I pronounce it the American way because I want to be understood... not because it sounds better. I could give a fuck how something sounds; language is about communication. And if you're saying "Jif," we still know what you mean, but we think less of you for either not knowing better, or are just pedantic — exactly how I expect to be received if I pronounce "garage" like I think it's meant to be said.
That wasn't to stir up controversy, that's just Rowling being a piece of shit. She regularly supports groups aiming to strip rights from people and has openly stated that any money from Harry Potter is a direct endorsement of her abhorrent views. The only ethical move is to boycott anything related to the franchise.
Yeah, I get that, I think she's just vocal to stir up controversy and it's working. Totally agree she's a piece of shit!
I pronounce it that way because its gift minus the t. "Graphics" has nothing to do with it, since I don't pronounce JPEG as Jay-pheg.
"The ga-RAH-ge! Oh lah-dee dah, Mr. Frenchman."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhbJnlIvfyc
I don’t disagree with you about the meat of your comment, but holy hell do I hate the English pronunciation of “garage.” Different strokes for different folks!
They were never falling out of favour, and there's not a single human being out there using WebP, only Google and bots touch that format.
Okay, honest question: how much preference do people really put into formats?
Because I've dealt with webp... I don't like it, but if I can open it in XnView and convert it to JPEG I'm good. Like my iPhone takes pictures in HEIC and if I send them raw to my wife's Galaxy phone, it doesn't open them, but if I convert them to JPEG (Telegram has this option, it's what we use for rich-text messaging), it's fine.
I don't like proprietary formats, but I don't hate them if I can convert them, or better yet use them. Like I can read and write Microsoft 365 docx and the similar formats for Excel and Powerpoint in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote on my Mac. It's not a problem. PDF can be an issue with Adobe trying to fleece users into paying to type in it, but open it in Firefox and you can type in it just fine. We shouldn't even have anything by Adobe installed at work but we do. I'm not IT but I'm getting sick of teaching people how to open PDFs in Firefox instead of Acrobat so they can edit the bloody things. All our forms are PDF and I can edit/save them just fine but Acrobat won't. So I set Firefox as the default but updates change it back.
Thats a silly thing to doubt, when the creator said that's how he intended it. I also often say it the right way just to irritate people who sound as insufferable about it as you, though.
And Rowling is clearly leaning a lot harder into TERFdom than just wanting to stay "relevant." Don't minimize the pain and suffering she causes with her bigotry like that.
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Irony is dead.
😜
I read the word gif online MANY times before ever hearing any soul pronounce it. In my head it just makes so much more sense as a soft J. No one is choosing to pronounce it with a soft J because of peanut butter, that’s fucking dumb.
You make it sound like hard G is “correct”. There’s no correct. It’s the same as every other English word that has several different correct pronunciations.
Get off your high horse and stop being a complete asshole. Just let people pronounce things how they want, everyone knows what they are saying. You know, the entire point of a language.
Oh look, an Internet bully!
See, nobody cares.