Gucci Little Piggy

I didn’t even know that there is a big disagreement among computer nerds about how to say “gif”.  From The Atlantic:

Okay, really: Is it GIF as in “gift” or GIF as in “jiffy”? There have been many guides addressing this question — and even, via Jon Oram, an attempt at detente. And yet we seem no closer to consensus. There’s the hard-g camp and the soft-g … and they don’t seem to be coming together anytime soon.

Part of the challenge is that even the most definitive guides when it comes to pronunciation aren’t, actually, fully definitive. Because, even when they’re insistent one way or the other — and they’re almost always not insistent — there will still be a whole swath of Internet-dwellers pronouncing the thing the other way. This is the “sherbert” vs. “sherbet” — the “orange” vs. “aw-range,” the “potato” vs. “potahto” [sic] — of contemporary Internet culture. It is sort of sad. But it is also sort of weird. Why is this tiny little word so divisive?

To remind everyone (I wanted to look it up myself to be sure), a soft “g” is “jiffy” while a hard “g” is gift.

Maybe since I’m not all that invested in this argument (though I do hate animated gifs) and because I’ve probably never said the acronym out loud, I hope to provide a voice of reason.  This seems pretty cut-and-dry to me.  “Gif” is an acronym for “graphics interchange format“.  Without a strong preemptive rationale for a soft “g”, we should look to the technical term for guidance on how to pronounce the acronym.  So since “graphics” is pronounced with a hard “g” it should follow that “gif” is pronounced with a hard “g” as well.  Losers.