When you hear someone pronounce GIF as 'JIF

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The creator of the format says "JIF", so I say it as well.
- He came out with that after almost 30 years of watching people fight over it. Yeah no, I've been saying [G]IF since 1996 and it's not changing now. He can shove his JIF where the sun doesn't shine.
  
  It’s well documented going all the way back to 1987 when the format was first coined that it was always a soft g. Compuserve had it in their official memos. An early gif had the pronunciation embedded as a comment in its code. Witnesses attested that the creator would go around the office saying, “Choosy developers use gif,” a play on “Choosy moms choose Jiff.”
  
  No he didn’t. They literally sold it as “choosy developers choose gif”. It was part of the marketing to software devs. He didn’t feel the need to say anything on fucking stage until normies started using it and couldn’t understand context.
  
  When he invented it he named it after the penutbutter.
  The slogan was "choosy developers choose gif" to parody "choosy moms choose jiff".
  
  "I've invented a thing! I call it a cup!"
  You: "wow I love chup, everyone come look at this cool chup"
  Doubling down on being wrong just makes you double wrong.
  
  I don't recall ever hearing what the actual pronunciation was until ten years ago. Was there a whitepaper or anything? The name spread by word of mouth. He should have done a better job of making sure it was being called what he wanted to call it. It's like trademarks. You don't use it, you lose it. For fucks sake he's been sitting in the shadows since 1987 just chilling and then busts out with the "official" one in 2013.
  
  Sir or madam or otherwise, that is not how words work.
  I once saw a garden center with the french word "soleil" (pronounced "so-lay") in the name, everyone in the area pronounced it "so-leel", but just because the French don't kick down the doors and correct people doesn't make "so-leel" any less incorrect. There is a correct and an incorrect way to say words, frequency of usage is irrelevant.
  
  That's kind of how language works. If everybody in the local area understand each other perfectly fine, then it has served its purpose.
  Theres' a town in my region called "Purcellville", and everybody not from the area including Google will pronounce it as "PurCELL-ville" as spelled out, but every single resident within the town will insist its "Perc-UH-ville". Which is the "wrong" pronunciation. But the people in that town literally don't give AF.
  
  Whether the people give af or not is irrelevant. If the founder(s) of the town intended it to be pronounced Purcellville, the people are wrong. If the founder(s) said percuhville, then they're not wrong.
  
  The founders are long dead and nobody alive has ever heard them say the name. That's how language changes from one into another over time. That's how we got all the thousands of unique languages on Earth.
  First, it's an accent. Then over time, it becomes heavier and heavier until it eventually becomes a brand new language. Words may even be borrowed and used from other languages and changed as well.
  
  The tag line provided by the creator when the format was created back in 1987 was "choosey image users choose gif" Clearly a parody of a similar tag line from Jif peanut butter.
  You are incorrect.
  It's jif.
- But clearly he's an idiot.
- Is there anything, at all, that I can do, to convince you, that you sound, like an idiot?
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=9iafa959JvY
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- I use the same metric and use the English pronunciation of words as an American.l, because they're correct and we are wrong.
  I'm considered a hipster douche for it.
  Others are correct to say so.
  Al-uuuuu-min-eee-umm
  Yaw-gert
  Tuh-mot-o
  
  Aluminum was an either or from the start and it just happened which side of the ocean got which and that they weren’t the same
  
  Yeah but what the Brits eventually chose should go.
  The only other option is to bomb the UK into oblivion and change the language's name to American, and I'm a pacifist, so I'd rather just say it the correct way as the owners dictate without murdering them and declaring the language ours now.
  
  You can have different dialects in the same language. American English is a dialect of English that is different from British English.
  
  Just like Coca Cola and generic off brand garbage cola!
  They're equally... pfff... valid soft drinks!
- Is he a linguist tho?

199 comments