• TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        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.”

      • snowe@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • w2tpmf@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        When he invented it he named it after the penutbutter.

        The slogan was “choosy developers choose gif” to parody “choosy moms choose jiff”.

      • Lizardking27@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        “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.

        • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Lizardking27@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • parpol@programming.dev
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              1 year ago

              People from Nevada would like to have a word with you.

              Also, no. Frequency of usage is the only thing relevant. That’s how language was formed. It wasn’t something one guy decided, it was something everyone adopted.

              • Lizardking27@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Look friend, be wrong if you want. That’s your prerogative.

                The french didn’t create the word “soleel”, the founder of the garden center didn’t name his business “soleel”, the word “soleel” does not exist. Everyone who uses the word “soleel” is wrong. Usage is irrelevant, the creator gets to decide. Period. It’s jif. Be wrong or be right, your call. Just own your decision.

                • boydster@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  I learned a new word today that I think can help here by way of a story. “Ooftish” is the word, it’s a Yiddish word that translates in English to money. And I don’t know a lot of Yiddish words, but I’ve been getting into etymology so I read more about it. The word comes from a phrase that means “money on the table”, and the phrase was pronounced roughly “gelt af tish” (from one snapshot in time, anyway, according to wordsmith.org, this isn’t meant to be an absolute) where gelt is the word for money and tish is the word for table.

                  That made me wonder, how did this word “ooftish” come to be, because there was a word in the ancestor phrase that literally meant money already. One idea: someone that maybe didn’t speak the language but had been exposed to it heard someone say “gelt af tish,” understood enough context to know money was being spoken about, and took the part of the phrase they remembered and started using it to refer to money. And then it caught on. That doesn’t have to be true to make my point, because the next part is really the important part of the thought experiment.

                  Imagine this person starts using this word “ooftish” and it catches on as an inside joke among friends. They teach their kids, it spreads, more people are now using the word. It’s still a local thing, but it’s catching on. Another couple generations, and it’s become the defacto in-group way for a population to refer to money. But they’re all talking about a prepositional phrase referring to some unnamed thing that is situated on a table, and they’ve all long-forgotten the birth of the phrase and never use the word “gelt” at all anymore. Let me ask you: Is that entire population wrong today for using the word “ooftish” even though it is a linguistic travesty in this hypothetical world? Or does it make sense for them to keep using the word, because they all know what they mean when they use it and it would actually be more complicated to try and backfill this word with the more linguistically pure word that was used before?

                  You can’t use logic like “everyone else is wrong but me” about language, as satisfying as it would be sometimes to do so. We use language to communicate, and if we’re trying to get a message across, we communicate in the way that best accomplishes the need at hand - sharing an idea with others. That means the way words are used by a population is more important than grandstanding over how anyone thinks particular words should be used.

                • parpol@programming.dev
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                  1 year ago

                  I formally invent my synonym to GIF. It’s GIF and pronounce it GIF, not JIF. Now everyone who pronounce it GIF are correct even by your logic. I also formally invent a figure of speech that goes by “It’s JIF” and means “I’m wrong” which means even you admit that you are wrong, and you cannot say otherwise because I’m the inventor, not you.

                  • Lizardking27@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    Wow. Now you’re just being deliberately obtuse and vindictive. You are not worth continuing this conversation with. Grow up.

            • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              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.

              • Lizardking27@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                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.

                • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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                  1 year ago

                  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.

          • Lizardking27@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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.

    • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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

        • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • SuperIce@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            You can have different dialects in the same language. American English is a dialect of English that is different from British English.

            • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Just like Coca Cola and generic off brand garbage cola!

              They’re equally… pfff… valid soft drinks!