Guys, the GIF wars! One of the things that has fascinated me about the recent resurgence of animated GIFs has been people's passionate divisiveness when it comes to the pronunciation of the word itself. Hard g versus soft g, brother against brother! For some reason, we really, really care about the difference between "giff" and "jiff." And this seems unfortunate, because what are animated GIFs good for besides BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER IN PEACE AND JOY AND CATS?

So I'm wondering: How do you pronounce GIF? Why do you pronounce it that way? Why is your way superior to the alternative?

Here goes.

I pronounce it "gif." With a soft G. I'm not going to write "jiff," because "gif" is pronounced as I pronounce it. GIF.

I'm not alone in this. As everyone probably knows, GIFs were invented by Compuserve. [ en.wikipedia.org ] The expression is short for "Graphics Interchange Format." The people at Compuserve, who invented the term, pronounce it with a soft G. [ olsenhome.com ]

Before my current job, [ grist.org ] I worked for Adobe Systems as a designer. No company is more responsible for the production of GIFs over history than Adobe, makers of Photoshop. And literally, during the two-and-a-half years I worked there -- working with other designers, with the people who made Photoshop -- never did I hear anyone pronounce it with a hard G. I was assigned to work with Cisco on the creation of a joint Adobe-Cisco web design curriculum as part of the Cisco Networking Academy; no one at Cisco pronounced it that way either.

In fact, in the now nearly two decades I've been doing web design, only of late has this become a major issue. I think I know why.

GIFs are far more common than they used to be -- and people are far more familiar with them. So more people have an opinion simply based on having heard of the format. But very, very few people have their first exposure (or even early exposure) to the word come through verbal communication.

When you see it written down, sitting there at the end of a file on your desktop or acclaimed in a BuzzFeed post, your brain can make one of two assumptions about how it is pronounced -- and it will. You're probably even more likely to pick the wrong one. That's fine!

But it's not then OK to aggressively defend your mispronunciation, any more than it would be to argue with your English teacher about how you pronounce "macabre" or "niche" or any other word you might have read and then mispronounced. And -- this is key -- EVEN IF YOUR ENGLISH TEACHER IS WRONG, that doesn't make you right.

Yes, language evolves. But this isn't an evolution -- it's an acceptance and blind defense of an error. It's Noah Webster unilaterally trying to change history, [ en.wikisource.org ] with all of Webster's success and none of his rationale.

GIF. Soft G. Embrace accuracy. Don't blindly defend ignorance. Who are you, Sarah Palin?

You've convinced me. Well done, sir.

Oh, no, Pbump! I'm *thisclose* to being convinced, myself. (And that is saying a lot: As you know, I am a pretty die-hard 'hard G'-er.) WELL DONE.

[Insert emoticon indicating GIF-pronunciation-related existential crisis here.]

The only thing I'd say by way of hard-g defense is that the compelling soft-g argument you're making essentially boils down to a kind of pronunciation-specific originalism. 'What the founders intended' being, in this case, the soft g.

That's totally fine, but I wonder whether we need to make more affordances for the evolution of the pronunciation of the term. Because people who use the hard g may well be perpetrating an error ... but they're also perpetrating an error that's so common that it effectively ceases to be an error anymore.

(Eg: I grew up in California, near a town called "Los Gatos" -- which, per the original Spanish, is properly pronounced "Los Gahtos" … but which everyone calls "Los Gatos," with the English pronunciation. Were I to call it by its historically correct name, I'd likely either confuse or insult people.)

So I'd say that it's not "language evolves, but" ... but rather "language evolves, so." We have to allow for that evolution. As a grammar nerd, I can't be totally defeatist about errors that make their way in the vernacular ... but I also don't think we can be so beholden to history as to impose restrictions on language -- grammar, syntax, pronunciation, whatever -- as it moves forward.

And as GIFs have their resurgence, it seems like more and more people are going with the hard G. That's worth something. It doesn't, on its own, argue for the hard G ... but it makes the hard G just as viable as the soft. And more so, if the hard-g trend continues.

However! (Full disclosure!) All that aside, a big chunk of my *personal* preference for "GIF" has its roots in the hard-g's awesome punning potential. I am slightly ashamed of this, but there it is. GIFs are "the GIF that keeps on GIFing." And "God's GIF to the Internet." Etc. Pronounced with a hard g, GIFs invoke treats and surprises and delights. Which is appropriate to what they are, animated, as a medium. Much more appropriate, certainly, than peanut butter.