A hacker was once a computer enthusiast, and the media made it into a name for criminals who break into other people’s systems.
Decades ago, people started using baud when they meant BPS. Not many technical people back then, but it wasn’t possible to correct the few who made the mistake. Even one top member of the CCC (Chaos Computer Club) said it’s just “baud” now, no matter the real meaning.
(baud = symbols per second. A symbol can transport multiple bits, so a V.32 modem with 9600 bps worked at 2400 baud, 4 bits per symbol.)
GIF is an image format. Multiple frames stored in such a file can get played like a video. But today every video without sound gets called a GIF.
AI is an old term. But today most people say AI but only mean genAI.
It’s even more absurd: There are gamers who demand computer games without AI. WTF?
AI was always part of computer games. Even the early computerized board games. I remember Half-Life fans loving the enemy AI. And I think one of the games in the Wolfenstein franchise had enemies that found cover when shot at. That’s normal, old AI. Not genAI.
If AI is really lost, how do we discuss the thing that was once considered AI?
“GIF” as in giraffe, btw.
You forgot the biggest pronunciation hijack of the century.
The developers of PNG at least documented the pronunciation right from the start: ping
I still call it P N G
I’ve always disliked these short and sweet justifications for one pronunciation over another as there’s a million justifications that can go either way.
Here’s an arguably more more apt example considering it contains every letter from the original acronym: “GIF” as in gift.
In my opinion, go with the one the causes less confusion. There’s already a brand using the “JIF” pronunciation and nothing else using the “GIF” pronunciation so I prefer the hard G pronunciation.
If the inventor of .GIF was a linguist, maybe we would have used his suggestion. .GIF is a file format. JIF is a peanut-butter.
Gerraffe it is.
Some words that begin in gi have a j sound and some have a g sound. There’s no rule. English just be like that.
There’s giraffe and there’s girl.
There’s gibberish and there’s gibbon.
There’s gigantic and there’s gigabyte.
There’s ginger and there’s gingham.
The whole debate on GIF is dumb. Both pronunciations are acceptable. I would say it like gift personally, but there’s no reason to think that gif- has to sound like g vs j. There’s just no rule for it in English.
It’s one of the few playful arguments left in this world, I think. If there is one that can still be had online, it’s probably this one.
To be honest, I pronounce gif like “gif” or “gif” depending on my mood.
While my personal bias is in the creators favor, it doesn’t seem to me that GIF is even a proper word to begin with. It’s an abbreviation and a format extension. As such, there aren’t any rules that should be applied even if there were rules that could.
File extensions have such a wide variety of pronunciations it makes “gif” irrelevant anyway. (Is it E-X-E or is it “ex-ee”?)