this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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And words don't need to sound the way they did when they were coined
But if you are talking about the correct way to pronounce something shouldn’t that be the way the creator named it?
It’s like if you named your dog Aaron and they went by the name for a while and all of a sudden people start calling him Ay Ay Ron because they saw the two As and assumed that was how to pronounce it.
What pronunciation would you consider correct the one the creator came up with or the one an uninformed consensus came up with?
Ever heard of dialects? Accents? Creoles? There are no correct or incorrect pronunciations, just functional and non-functional ones. Gif currently has two functional pronunciations. That doesn't make one more correct than the other just because the guy who said it first said it that way. If you are able to accurately relay the information you're trying to relay, you are "correct". If the dog responds to ay-ay-ron, that is functionally its name.
It’s not the guy who said it first it’s the guy who made a file format and chose a name that was the same as the peanut butter company…
Are you seriously this narcissistic that you can’t admit the way you say something is technically wrong? A product was made with a specific name and you choose to say it contrary to that way because it conveys the information it’s a perfectly acceptable way of pronouncing it but if you can’t admit that you are technically wrong in something so stupid and benign as a pronunciation of an acronym then you might have a problem.
I’ll even go first and announce to all the people on this thread that I am in facts not gods gift to the world and sometimes pronounce words differently than their correct pronunciations because the correct ones are less fun.
Hey I'm the one who said it's the only argument that holds any water, I just already have water. I lost this argument to my brother over a decade ago and have admitted I was wrong since then. Language is only valuable insofar as you're able to make your point understood to the people you're talking to. There is no correct way to say anything except the way that your audience understands. I'll give you that the 1987 CompuServ file was pronounced with a soft g (seemingly due to lazy marketing), but the word has gone beyond that product. As others have mentioned, most "gifs" are not even in that format anymore and haven't been for years and years. The majority of people using the word don't really know what it means and certainly don't know or care how it was coined. But if it makes you feel better, I promise the next time I'm buying a .gif in 1987, I'll use the soft g.
If you're getting this upset about something you admit is stupid and benign then you might have a problem.
"island" was originally spelled "eiland" until some scholars started adding an 's' to it in order to make it look more Latin (despite not having a Latin root).
Which spelling would you consider correct? The original or the one people use?
You are comparing the evolution of language from hundreds of years to a group of people mispronouncing a word since it’s usually seen written from only a a few decades ago
The format came out in 1987 and the creator has on multiple occasions said that the correct way to pronounce it is with a soft g
If in 2187 if the whole world starts saying it with a hard g you can pretend that’s correct and comparable to an evolution of the human language but considering the founder is still alive and calling it gif and your argument boils down to “the person who created it is saying it wrong” then it’s not comparable to the change in spelling of island…
Nope. I am talking about how one person on one day did a specific thing and it caught on. Was "island" not acceptable when written that way and only acceptable exactly 100 years after they did that?
Okay, so exactly how long does a word have to be used a specific way before people shut the fuck up about it?
This is another case of "my exact usage of language is correct. Anything from before I was born is incorrect, and no further changes can be tolerated until I am dead."
The day a person wrote island they were wrong. If they tried to insist to everyone else that they were right and the dictionaries are wrong they would be called an idiot. If they tried to insist to everyone that they came up with an alternate spelling to align with the Latin roots that’s a different story.
Now considering this is an arbitrary name that someone made up to specifically call it gif like the peanut butter brand… I would say they get at least a few decades of them being correct
You can say it with a hard g as much as you want but to claim you are correct is another story
But the English word for Island does not have any Latin roots, so it's even dumber.
I agree that the person who first put an 's' in 'Island' was an idiot. I think it's idiotic that that is now the correct spelling. But at some point the 's' in 'island' went from stupid to correct and it would be even dumber for me to try to fight against it.
My point is that it wasn't a factor of time that made 'island' the correct spelling, it was simply a factor of common usage. Language is defined by how it is used and understood. If people pronouce it gif and are understood then that is the correct pronunciation. Arguing against that is a waste of time, and it's also admitting that the pronouciation you prefer is not the one commonly used and understood.