this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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I always thought the G stood for graphics, but now I know it stands for giraffics.
It doesn't matter what it stands for. That's not how acronyms work.
You don't say "yolwa" for "YOLO"
You don't say "Ah-ih-dees" for "AIDS"
You don't say "britches" for "BRICS"
You don't say "sue-knee" for "CUNY" (City University of New York) Etc.
And if you want to argue specifically about G:
You don't say "Jad" for "GAD" (generalized anxiety disorder)
You don't say "joes" for "GOES" (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite)
It's not a hill I'm going to die on, I use both pronunciations, but the only argument I've ever believed for the proper one is that the creator pronounced it "jif". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Pronunciation
Now let's talk about "gibs" you heathens.
Yeah, but they're wrong, so it's hard G
SCUBA and NASA are always the ones I use against that argument. It would be Skuh-baa instead of scooba, and neh-sa instead of nah-suh.
And no matter what way it was spelled, it’s the only word we’re still arguing about that literally has a song to go with it to make sure everyone pronounced it correctly. It’s pretty clearly a soft g, because it was a marketing trick, not a dictionary word. It doesn’t have to follow any rules of English, just like all those companies just removing random letters and changing ck for x, etc. Flickr, tumblr, Grindr, scribd, Lyft, Kwik, Cheez, etc etc etc. Twitter was originally even twttr.
People forget in the 90s/00s both GIF and JIF were relatively common image file types. It was only logical to use the hard G for GIF. So that's how we used it. This overrules all arguments of how acronyms work or what the creator originally called it.
nobody was using jif as a file type in the 90s, and no it wasn't "only logical to use the hard G". There are plenty of sources stating that no one pronounced it with a soft g up until it got popular as an image format on social media. It was universally understood to be a play on the peanut butter name. There are plenty of sources on this, I'm sorry but you're either just making shit up or you were the only person to call it with a hard g in the 90s.
I used jif files in the 90s. Sure they were less common but they existed. Everyone I knew said gif like gift in the 90s. I sure other people said jif instead. But I'm not making this up. Your experiences aren't necessarily universal.
Bah, I was there. .jif was barely used and came 5 years after. They should have used a different name!
I thought we were having a bit of a joke, but then you really went and gave me a gift of paragraphs.
I think the creator was keeping the joke running by saying that. The word gift is why people prefer to say gif over jif, it's how we were taught to pronounce "gif". The rest of the g words are irrelevant to be honest.
Of course not, then it would conflict with SUNY (State University of New York)
JPEG = "jay-feg"
Jrafics.