The Internet has come a long way in the last 25 years. Once the exclusive domain of scientists and the military, it’s now in the offices, living rooms and phones of almost everyone on the planet.
One thing, however, has not changed: the propensity of users with inadequate social skills to torment one another in nitpicky arguments.
This became more than apparent recently when one of the pioneers of the Internet, Steve Wilhite of CompuServe, was given a Webby Award for lifetime achievement. Wilhite developed a popular image format in 1987. He called it GIF — short for Graphics Interchange Format. But he’s insisted since the beginning that people pronounce it “jiff”.
Hard or soft?
Wilhite arrived at this because the compression in GIFs allows them to be transmitted across the Internet “in a jiffy”. Perhaps he had to have G as part of the name because of the word “graphics”. But he should have known what was going to happen.
Programmers who worked with him spread the news to other programmers that GIF was pronounced “jiff”, while regular people, who only saw the word GIF in print, read it as “gift” without the “t”.
English pronunciation rules allow both. We have gin, gist and gibberish with a “j” sound — but also gill, giddy and girl with a hard “g” sound. Because GIF is an acronym, it is irrelevant that the G stands for “graphics” and not “giraffe” (which has a “j” sound in English).
A similar debate concerns the word “gigabyte”. “Giga-”, say the purists, comes from the word “gigantic”, and should be pronounced “jigga” — but hardly anyone does this.
Things came to a head two weeks ago, when Wilhite was given his award. His five-word acceptance speech was: “It’s pronounced ‘JIF’, not ‘GIF’.” (Actually, he forgot the comma, which I should fault him for in true Internet fashion.)
Who owns it?
The comments sections of tech websites and The New York Times exploded with derision. “Well, maybe if it were an acronym for ‘giraffic interchange format’,” wrote one reader. Another asked, “Is Steve Wilhite being honored for having a speech impediment?” while someone replied, “Gif me a break.” There was also lots of wordplay based on the fact that “Jif” is the name of a popular American brand of peanut butter.
Jif, like GIF, is an artificial word. So if you invent a word, do you own it? Well, no. As one commenter pointed out: “People will use Wilhite’s pronunciation pronouncement as faithfully as they followed Alexander Graham Bell’s command to answer the phone with ‘Ahoy’.”
So if the majority of people mispronounce a word, does their pronunciation then count as correct? It does as far as dictionaries are concerned. They have the last word (if you’ll pardon the pun), and they accept both pronunciations, while preferring the most popular one.
But back to my original point. Does this argument even matter? GIF has long been superseded by better-quality file formats like JPEG and PNG (pronounced “jay-peg” and “ping”). The only advantage GIF still offers is animation: it can blink at us or display changing images. In other words, the only reason GIF still exists is to annoy us. Let’s move on.
