GIF or Jif? The Great Pronunciation Debate with Cathy Sirvatka: WPS008

Is G.I.F. pronounced GIF or JIF? Join me, Cathy Sirvatka, as we dig into the amusing argument surrounding this well-known graphic format. We'll journey back to its beginnings, exploring the creators' original intent for its pronunciation. Spoiler alert: there's no wrong way to say it! 

We also get into its features as compared to the JPG and its historical role in web graphics. It's time to settle the debate. Sort of.  And remember, I'd love to hear your take on it and any other 'debatables' you encounter in your web design adventures.

Transcript

Cathy Sirvatka: 0:58

Cathy Sirvatka: I was listening to a podcast the other day and they started talking about the graphic format G I F and they started arguing about how to pronounce that acronym and I thought to myself I've heard this argument for many years now, and there are a lot of things in the world, and in web design specifically, that are debatable. Not that there's necessarily a right or wrong way, but there are different ways of seeing things, pronouncing things, doing things, and people still debate them. I think this comes out of perhaps the way you learned it in the first place or your preference, and it causes me to think that it's fun to have these kind of debates and to figure out people's reasons behind their position, but it should never become anything that's so argumentative that it divides us. That's why I think these are debatable items, because these are debatable things and it doesn't make you right or wrong and it doesn't change the overall outcome of something. For instance, how do you say G I F? Do you say it GIF or do you say it GIF? Now, the way you pronounce it doesn't affect the artwork you create in this format or the web design you create using this format, although I will say, these days there aren't too many of these graphic files out there anymore because we've got the PNG now.

Cathy Sirvatka: 2:26

Now, I was raised to say GIF and I learned that when I worked at Bell Labs. The reason I learned it that way is because the company that created this format was called Compuserve and the team that created it initially called it GIF. They actually wanted it to reflect the name, or echo the name, of the peanut butter GIF, peanut butter. And they would say choose the developers, choose GIF, which is kind of cute. Developers have a sense of humor.

Cathy Sirvatka: 2:57

Who knew. It was such a cool format and though it's limited in its colors you can only have 256 colors in a GIF it was really great for flat illustrations, non gradient graphics, logos, that kind of thing, and it always drove me nuts when I would see flat colored logos saved as JPEGs, and that was always because people didn't really understand the difference between the two. But the GIF was a really wonderful compressed graphical format. It introduced transparency and animation and if you all remember seeing spinny objects all over web pages back in the day because it was so fun and cool, who didn't want to have spinny things on their web page? Of course we all got sick of that and it didn't last too long, thank goodness, but it became the go-to for the flat illustration. This graphical format is a lossless compression and that means that you can save it over and over. If you want to open it, edit it, add something to it, save it again. You will never lose the quality, the initial quality of the graphic. It never loses data, as opposed to the JPEG, which is used for thousands and millions of colors, like photographs. That is a lossy format, meaning every time you resave it, if you do anything to it. You lose data each time, a little bit of data each time, and over time it can really degrade the quality. So that's lossy, but the GIF was lossless and this was a really great thing.

Cathy Sirvatka: 4:35

So, anyway, which is correct, GIF or GIF? Well, actually both are correct, I know right. So, like I said, the folks at Compuserve called it GIF, but the G stands for graphics, and so if you didn't know the original story, it would be understandable that you would think graphics, gif, and that makes total sense. And so we get this debate GIF. Well, that's what the original people said GIF because it's graphic.

Cathy Sirvatka: 5:08

So the dictionaries that I looked at say both pronunciations are correct. So how's that? It's debatable, but, as it turns out, both are correct and it's okay. It's okay people. I've heard so many arguments about this and it's really it's more like an argument between fans of different sports teams, which is fun, you know, it's just kind of a tongue-in-cheek argument, yeah, so I guess it's just one of those things where we need to give grace to those who say it differently than we're used to. So what do you think? Which way do you say it, and what other debatables do you know about? I'd love to hear what you may be having debates about within your work sphere. Let me know and I'll do an episode about it.