GIF Becomes Word of the Year 2012

mikejuk writes "GIF started out as a humble acronym 25 years ago, entered common parlance as the format used for web graphics and now achieves fame as a verb by becoming Oxford Dictionaries USA Word of the Year 2012. GIF as a noun has always been an all-capital letter noun. Becoming a verb has caused problems concerning the use of capital and lower case letters. The common form is to keep the noun in caps and add the verbal endings in lower case — as in GIFed,GIFing), However, an all lower-case spelling with the f duplicated (giffed, giffing) is also being used."

silly

[FalseModesty]

It's 25 years old. How can it be the word of this year?

Just in time

[Arancaytar]

Who even uses GIF anymore?

Re:But how does it sound?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they publish it with the hard G so that becomes the accepted pronunciation. Face it, the soft G version just sounds dumb.

Re:Just in time

[jandrese]

PNG tried, but they had no traction on MNG, so they reworked it into APNG and still had no takers.

Re:Verb form: no

[amicusNYCL]

the issue is that people would thing do verb that noun in the first place

err, what was that?

First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.

- Peter Ellis

Re:Just in time

[SourceFrog]

If that's your experience, you're almost certainly using an inferior PNG encoder (yes, PNG compression works in ways that effectively allow 'bad implementations' to create larger files :/ .. one of the big things that held it back was a common misconception that it gave inferior compression due to a popular image manipulation package (Photoshop) that had a shitty PNG implementation. With a proper encoder, basically the only time GIF should give you smaller filesizes, is on very small images (e.g. 10x10 pixels), where the size is anyway usually maybe a couple hundred bytes (though this can make some difference, depending on the scale of your application (e.g. if you were tasked on optimizing the size of something that appears on Google's front page that must be delivered trillions of times), it might still be worth bothering to figure out which is smaller in that case, but usually the difference is negligible).

Re:But how does it sound?

[Joce640k]

Those either have diphthongs or are bastardized versions of a weird foreign word (giraffe).

Do you have an example of a word that starts with "gif..." where the 'g' is pronounced like 'j'?

Re:But how does it sound?

[cayenne8]

Hmm...more important that pronounciation...

Does anyone actually even USE gifs anymore??

I've not heard anyone even mention them in decades for the most part...

Aside from the odd animated gif here and there, I've not really thought I'd encountered one in a LONG time...

Shocked to see it as word of the year...

Re:And also...

[number6x]

You left one very important word out of your list of hard G words: Graphic.

GIF is an acronym for Graphic Interchange Format, not for Giraffe interchange format. So the G in GIF is hard, just like the G in Graphic.

Re:But how does it sound?

[osu-neko]

The OED describes, not prescribes.

All dictionaries do. They're anthropological documents, really. They document observations of an aspect of human behavior: the words they use and what they mean when they use them. It boggles my mind that anyone gets confused about that, thinking they do anything more...