I have long thought the story was over too, but I’m guessing we’re reading different books.”Ĭhan and I and the US President are just going to ignore Wilhite and just continue to pronounce it with a hard ‘G,’ like ‘gift’ without the ‘T.’ Because no one on the planet pronounces it ‘jif. Sir, why did you not name it JIF like the peanut butter then! End of story. Gizmodo’s Casey Chan pretty much sums up my view on this, in an article so elaborately ridiculous it brings joy, “He’s saying we, the people of America, are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.” Choosy programmers choose 'gif' or 'jif' The pronunciation of 'GIF' is specified in the GIF specification to be 'jif', as in 'jiffy', rather than 'gif', which most people seem to prefer. “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. He is proud of the GIF, but remains annoyed that there is still any debate over the pronunciation of the format. Wilhite wants you to know that the White House is wrong: His work has appeared in Mahoning Matters as well as The Vindicator and Tribune-Chronicle newspapers.The New York Times has a lovely interview up with Steve Wilhite, the inventor of the illustrious GIF file. He researches and writes on a variety of topics including communication technologies, relationships, and sports (with an emphasis on fandom). Earnheardt is special assistant to the provost and professor of communication in the department of communication at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, OH, USA where he also directs the graduate program in professional communication. Twitter helps by providing some suggested categories such as “applause” and “YOLO.”ĭr. From there, you can search for your favorites. Open your compose window in Twitter and look for the square GIF icon. One of my favorites is “white guy blinking,” an animated GIF of video editor Drew Scanlon blinking in disbelief in reaction to a comment from a video game player. Ask most Twitter users and they’ll have their favorites. Like static GIFs, animated GIFs are small files and easy to load. These GIFs are actually multilayered images that create the video-like, animated effects we see in memes on Twitter and other platforms. It’s the web designers equivalent of a West Coast-East Coast rap battle.īut animated GIFs are a step up from small, static images. Yet, there’s a weird pronunciation battle that lingers, with soft “g” users on one side and hard “g” users on the other. notes that, at some point, one of the GIF format creators, Bob Berry or Steve Wilhite said, “Choosy programmers choose GIF.” This was a play on the peanut butter commercials with the slogan, “Choosy moms choose Jif,” referring, of course, to the Jiffy peanut butter brand. The proper pronunciation of GIF uses a soft “g” sound: like JIF. We used GIFs to make upload and download much faster. Where’s the meme?” He was referring, of course, to my love of animated GIFs.Īccording to, GIF is the acronym for “graphics interchange format.” Back in the early days of the internet, we used GIF images because they were small, compressed files.Īs a webmaster in the mid-90s, I was trying to create beautiful websites that would load on home computers connected to 56k modems (for you youngins, that’s really, really slow). Not long ago, I posted a tweet without an animated GIF, and a friend replied, “I question whether or not this is the real (my Twitter handle). My animated GIF philosophy is quite simple: if a picture is worth a thousand words, then why not use multilayered images? After all, we’re limited to 140 characters on Twitter, and a lot can be misinterpreted without a little extra context. In fact, most if not all of my tweets in recent months have included an image, video, or animated GIF. I’m not ashamed to admit, I’m a notorious animated GIF user on Twitter. The things I love about Twitter, however, I tend to exploit. I can’t fix the things I hate about Twitter, so I use workarounds to avoid mean tweets and unpleasant interactions. In all honestly, it’s been a love-hate relationship. I’ve been using Twitter for the better part of 8 years.
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