Comic Strips

Nobody invented the mispronunciations, it just happens, which is why the manual included a guide. The inventor of the word (and the format) had to tell people how it was pronounced and why he chose the name, just like every other brand name.

What is recent is the fallacious arguments related to how acronyms are supposed to be pronounced, part of a larger trend towards obstinate and belligerent defense of an objectively and demonstrably false argument. The internet has made people feel like their opinions are just as valid as facts.

In the 90s, we nerds used technical terms like a shiboleth to separate other nerds from what the French call "les incompétents." But it's unlikely anyone would have corrected you back then, because doing so was considered impolite and elitist.

I see it as part of what Colbert called "truthiness." There is no rule for how the word should be pronounced, but it feels like there should be, which is why the argument is so often repeated. The feeling of being right is more important than the reality of ambiguity, and people seek out validation of their presuppositions. It's that overconfidence that fosters animosity towards debate, which is why people get so heated about silly things like this.

There are, there are just exceptions. For example, an e at the end of the word is silent. I’m certain you can give me a word where it’s not, but there are at least six in this paragraph alone where it is.

One of the most common words with a final "e" in that paragraph is "the" which not only has a final "e" sound, but has two different final "e" sounds depending on the context: "the end" uses a /ði/ pronunciation but "the word" uses a /ðə/ pronunciation. English is very stupid.

But, I agree with your assessment. English has rules, or at least patterns. "G" is most often hard, not soft, because "J" is available for the soft version, but there's no alternative for the hard version. English tends to follow patterns, and "gift" has a hard g, and it (and words based on it) are the only ones that start with "gif", so every "gif" word is hard. Because "t" (unlike "e") can't change the sounds before it, the pattern says that "gif" should have a hard "g".

If it were "gir", then there would be more debate. The word "giraffe" has a soft "g" but "girl" has a hard one, so the pattern is more muddy.

Also, people who coin words don't get to decide how they'll be pronounced. They can certainly try, but they'll often lose. There are plenty of words in English borrowed from other languages that not only sound nothing like the original language, but that sound nothing like they'd sound if they were English words. For example, "lingerie". It's a French word, but the English pronunciation sounds nothing like a French word. In fact, if someone just sounded out the word as if it were an English word, they'd probably get much closer to the French pronunciation than the awful "lawn-je-ray" which is the current accepted English pronunciation (though, they'd probably assume a hard "g" sound).

In this case, it's too bad that Steve Wilhite didn't have a background in linguistics or he would have realized that people would see "gif" and assume a hard "g". It was a losing fight from the start because he either didn't understand the assumptions people would have when they saw those letters, or he thought that somehow he could successfully fight the tide all by himself.

That is the most anti-linguistic take ever lmao. There is no such thing as an objectively correct pronunciation, both pronunciations of "gif" are valid in the context of most English conversations.

On another note, the guy who created it said it's pronounced /dʒɪf/, so if any pronunciation is more "correct" it's the one you hate. It's not "some people tried to claim", that's what it actually is "correctly" pronounced like according to the only one that can come close to being considered an authority on what the correct pronunciation is.

Your comment being so pretentious and stuck-up about you not liking a pronunciation leads me to believe you're making the whole "we" thing up, and instead of a group of people being dumbasses and laughing at a correct pronunciation, it was just one person (you) malding about it in their head. Because being the kind of person to actually laugh at something like that in real life, face to face, would be too embarrassing for anyone to actually go through with it. God even just reading your comment makes me feel like I'm looking at made-up Reddit stories again...

Also how people speaking other languages handle names doesn't have anything to do with this, there's a big difference between calling someone "wrong" for pronouncing a loanword differently than in the parent language because of the languages' phonetics & phonotactics not aligning with each other, and insisting that everyone else is "wrong" because their completely linguistically valid, common pronunciation challenges your understanding of the language.

Oxford uses /dʒɪf/ as the primary pronunciation with /gif/ as the secondary in most of their resources (although a lot don't specify a primary or secondary), Dictionary.com lists /dʒɪf/ as the primary pronunciation, some like Merriam-Webster list both equally, Cambridge less consistent but list both. Clearly the people who's job is language disagree with you, even if you don't want to ask for linguists to tell you, they literally make the language references you use. If you want to be stubborn and insist on being wrong, so be it.

You can now continue malding about the fact that you use the incorrect pronunciation for the rest of your life, since apparently that's how you see language.