For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don’t want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That’s ludicrous!

That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use “less” when they should use “fewer”

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205 points

If it were supposed to be pronounced “jif” it would have been spelled that way, I don’t give two fucks what Stephen Wilhite said about it either.

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67 points

Same with Gnome wanting to be pronounced “Gah-nome”, or Latex “Latech”. Just spell stuff the way you want it to be pronounced, or accept that people pronounce it another way

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53 points
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or Latex “Latech”. Just spell stuff the way you want it to be pronounced

But they did! You’re the one who fucked it up by using an “x” (Latin letter x) instead of a “χ” (Greek letter chi).

(Also, you didn’t capitalize or format it correctly. It’s supposed to be rendered as “LAΤΕΧ”, and yes, those last three letters are Τ Ε Χ Greek capital tau, epsilon, chi.)

🤓

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17 points

Lol, the only way to be more obtuse would be to say “our project name has no approved transliteration or Unicode string… Render this svg inline or don’t talk about us.”

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10 points

Just letting you know I appreciate that you used the actual “χ” instead of just “X” when referring to the letter Chi.

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3 points

New hill: All brand names must be composed entirely of pronounceable characters from languages in actual use today

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1 point

Gnome is spelt the way they want it to be said. Are you suggesting that gnome should be pronounced ‘nome’ like the garden ornament with a silent g.

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16 points

Is it not?

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33 points

we all know it’s actually pronounced “yiff”

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8 points

uwu

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6 points

Ah, you mean that old Linux sound server. Very deep reference.

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19 points

My argument for this is that gift is pronounced with a hard g, why would removing the t change anything. I think SW was trolling. But you want to know what’s totally bonkers? My coworker pronounced Git with a soft g. WTF my dude?

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7 points

Jithub makes me think of a place you go to get an STD.

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4 points
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Gi (martial arts uniform) and gin

Gel and geld

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2 points

Git is now pronounced “zhee”, with a thimble of espresso.

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19 points
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Agreed. I think since the “G” stands for “graphics” it should be pronounced like the G in graphics.

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23 points

But why? We don’t pronounce any other acronyms like that, so why treat GIF different? The U in SCUBA isn’t pronounced like it is in Underwater. The first A in CAPTCHA isn’t pronounced the same as in Automated and the CH isn’t split up to be pronounced like Computer and Human. The second A in NASA isn’t pronounced like in Administration and the I in PIN doesn’t get pronounced like Identification.

We read acronyms as their own words, not as a collection of the first sounds of each constituent word.

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1 point

Tbf, you’re pointing out the vowels which make the sounds needed to pronounce the acronym as a word. But I get it, either way, we’re pronouncing the word as a standalone word.

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1 point
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🤷 just cause?

Also, “gift”

Have any examples where the first letter of the acronym isn’t pronounced the same? (I’m sure there are some)

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9 points

I always respond that in that case, “jpeg” should be pronounced “jfeg”.

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17 points

Also .JIF is already a file format and as far as I know, it’s pronounced, “jif” just like it looks. So if “gif” and “jif” are supposed to be pronounced the same way, then why do we even have the letter J? Fuck the letter C too while we’re at it, get a unique sound, you bastard letter.

https://fileinfo.com/extension/jiff

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5 points

Oh wow that’s actually a really good point!

Now prepare for it to be dismissed! People are too dug in at this point, there’s no going back. The trenches have been dug.

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16 points
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There are so many other acronyms where you don’t pronounce every letter the same as their constituent words, I don’t understand why GIF is the one people have a problem with accepting. SCUBA, NASA, CAPTCHA, OWCA, etc.

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1 point

All of those help the pronunciation of the “word”. I’ve no clue what OWCA is, but for the others they didn’t change the very first letter that’s for kinda the most important in the phrase. It’s an image file, and they make it impossible to directly and verbally connect to the meaning of GRAPHICAL.

I’m not trying to fire on a hill for a pronunciation of an acronym just for my preference of g instead of j. But the absolute most important word in that phrase is graphical, and therefore the g noise absolutely has to be included and that is that for that argument. You don’t kill off the main character for some worse than Scrappy Doo schmuck.

And in what world are gif and jif better or worse sounding than each other for this to even have a point? It’s like whoever decided on making this fake j solely intended and only cared about making the meaning of it harder to figure out and less representative of its meaning.

Since this reply is about gif I’m mostly done, but as a quick point, for the other examples-

For SCUBA, I’m pretty sure it’s just pronounced wrong because fixing that would mess up the letters if they made it work by English rules (there would need to be 2 "B"s). So the argument comes down to making it an acronym or making a new word inspired by the acronym.

NASA is actually the same thing, with a pretty similar change that would be needed. (but 2 "S"s this time)

If both of these could just add a word their problems would be fixed and everyone would be happy.

CAPTCHA I’m only vaguely aware is an acronym and I’m not looking that up right now for sanity reasons (all these hills exploding in this thread giving me PTSD). So I don’t know how I feel about that one yet. But one day I’ll get curious and look at it.

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1 point

Laser needs the vowels to change, but there’s no reason to change the S.

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11 points
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It IS spelled that way

The inventor of the GIF pronounces it with a soft G

Geoffrey

Giraffe

Gymnasium

There are plenty of examples of that pronunciation

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0 points

all of the words you listed that use a soft g are loanwords from other languages (pretty sure they’re all french) soooo…yeah. no wonder those have different pronunciation.

when you look at anglo-saxon words the difference becomes clear:

  • gift
  • graveyard
  • ground
  • gay

all hard g’s.

mixing up languages is the common denominator here.

the G in GIF stands for graphical, neither english nor french in origin, hence the confusion about pronunciation.

alternatively; English is a terrible mess, and the only “correct” pronunciation is reached through general consensus. if the majority pronounces something a certain way, that’s how it should be pronounced.

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9 points

I have the opposite view, but I thought it would be too incendiary a topic to bring up…

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8 points

The thing is, that argument doesn’t really hold up, because g in English has two major pronunciations.

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-2 points

English being a bad language doesn’t excuse incorrect pronunciations. And if your argument was to hold any water, it’d be pronounced jraphics.

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4 points
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What a coincidence! This is my favorite hill to troll people on!

It’s absolutely meaningless, it just doesn’t matter, and people are sooo opinionated about it!

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3 points
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Jod Himself could descend from heaven, and decree “actually it’s pronounced jif…” And I’d still continue pronouncing it gif.

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3 points
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If it were meant to be pronounced ‘giff’ as in ‘goober’, it would have been spelled that way. You decide to turn an initialism into an acronym, you get what you get.

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24 points

I would like to buy you a nice jift

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11 points

Fair enough, LOL, though the second half of my comment still holds. I also need to buy some gin for my giraffe.

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6 points

I hope it’s a giraffe

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2 points

Maybe a nice stuffed jiraffe?

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6 points

It always WAS an acronym. That’s the entire point of the argument. "G"raphics "I"nterchange "F"ormat.

Nobody turned it into an acryonym, it just IS an acronym. That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. The reason it’s pronounced with a hard G is because Graphics is a hard G.

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6 points
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And Photographic is pronounced as /f/, yet we don’t insist on JPhEG or JFEG. Language is weird, and people often decline to create an acronym from a set of initials that could theoretically be one (“CIA”), or make an acronym where it may not initially seem natural (“HMMWV”).

Choosy nerds choose gif, soft G. :-)

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2 points

but g followed by i or e very regularly makes a soft g in English (and always makes a soft g in Italian, which is irrelevant I guess but I speak both). you may as well purposely mispronounce giraffe, gelatin, germ, Giorgio, giant, gentle, etc while you’re at it since it they don’t start with a j.

by english rules it very often is a soft g, but could be hard as well, but the creator has clarified multiple times it is meant to be soft, so why are people fighting it?

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5 points

gift

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2 points
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pan / pang

hat / hate

clam / claim

one letter can and often does completely change pronunciation. i’d give you a good ol’ fashion makin fun of, but i actually think you could’ve gotten there if you would’ve thought about for a few more seconds. you seem pretty smart. shame you clicked reply too soon.

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2 points
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1 point

Jermany?

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1 point

I don’t get the controversy. Say it either way and people know what you’re talking about.

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-5 points

If it was supposed to be pronounced jiraffe or jin, it would’ve been spelled that way, i don’t care all these idiots say.

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6 points

jfeg

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