2022-01-10

Two linguistic errors arising from technological ignorance have become commonplace:

• the mispronunciation of GIF, despite the term’s intended homage to a homonymous peanut butter
• the indiscriminate misreference to any moving picture as a GIF despite its likely encoding otherwise

In concession to the natural drift of language, I propose a bifurcation of terms such that these apparent errors resolve each other:

• GIF /dʒɪf/ (uppercase acronym pronounced like gist) strictly refers to Graphics Interchange Format, the obsolete image encoding scheme
• gif /ɡɪf/ (lowercase word pronounced like gift) denotes any moving picture

The pedants can keep their GIFs, and the kids can keep their gifs.