Choosy moms choose jif2/1/2024 Jonah Jameson’s first name is - Jeremiah!” Lee created both Spider-Man and J. Jonah Jameson from Spider-Man? Wikipedia says that his first name is John but in 2010, Stan Lee tweeted, “I herewith proclaim, for the world to see, that J. Rowling reveals information about the Harry Potter franchise on her Pottermore website, that’s “Word of God,” i.e., it’s considered canonical even though it doesn’t appear in any of the books. In this context, “Word of God” refers to information that comes straight from the ultimate authority. My second basis for favoring “jif” is based on a concept called “Word of God.” Despite the name, this is not a religious thing. Seriously, if you know of any examples in which we pronounce an acronym counterintuitively because of its base words, I would love to hear them! Now, as far as I’m concerned, this demolishes the “it’s spelled with a hard G” position but I’m open to the possibility of counter examples. The P stands for “Photographers” but it’s not pronounced “Asf.” And what about Content Integrated Research in Creative-User Systems (CIRCUS)? The first C stands for “Content” but the acronym is pronounced “circus,” not “kirkus.” Consider the American Society of Photographers (ASP). To my knowledge, nobody goes around saying it should be pronounced “skubba.” The same is true with “laser.” It’s short for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.” “Amplification” has a short A (as in cat) but we say “leizer” with a long A and not “lasser.” Consider the acronym “scuba,” which stands for “self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.” You’ll notice that, even though “underwater” is pronounced with a short U (“uh”), “scuba” is pronounced with a long U (“oo,” i.e., “skooba”). The whole point of an acronym is to create a pronounceable word the pronunciation of the letters in their original contexts is irrelevant. That may be so but the argument is irrelevant. “It’s a hard G because it stands for Graphic,” they insist. Those who say “giff” think they have logic on their side but they really don’t. I am unabashedly in the “jif” camp for two reasons: logic and authority. But there has been some heated debate as to its proper pronunciation: “jif” with a soft G (like giant, giraffe and Ginger Rogers) or “giff” with a hard G (like gryphon, gargoyle and Cary Grant). It stands for “Graphics Interchange Format” and it is a popular bitmap image format. The first point is “The way I do things is right and if you do them differently then you’re necessarily wrong.” But I like to have a moral or lesson aside from that.) Which brings us to the way we pronounce (or mispronounce) the word “GIF.” When I write about such things, however, I still try to have a point. I must not be alone in such interests because my column on the Oxford comma was surprisingly popular. I usually write about matters of Jewish thought but, given my background in linguistics, my pedantic personality and my tendency to use words like “pedantic,” I occasionally write about things like grammar, spelling and punctuation.
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