What's the most petty/pointless/pedantic hill you're willing to die on?

NotNotMike@programming.dev to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 456 points –

For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don't want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That's ludicrous!

That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use "less" when they should use "fewer"

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If it were supposed to be pronounced "jif" it would have been spelled that way, I don't give two fucks what Stephen Wilhite said about it either.

Same with Gnome wanting to be pronounced "Gah-nome", or Latex "Latech". Just spell stuff the way you want it to be pronounced, or accept that people pronounce it another way

or Latex “Latech”. Just spell stuff the way you want it to be pronounced

But they did! You're the one who fucked it up by using an "x" (Latin letter x) instead of a "χ" (Greek letter chi).

(Also, you didn't capitalize or format it correctly. It's supposed to be rendered as "L^A^Τ~Ε~Χ", and yes, those last three letters are Τ Ε Χ Greek capital tau, epsilon, chi.)

🤓

Lol, the only way to be more obtuse would be to say "our project name has no approved transliteration or Unicode string... Render this svg inline or don't talk about us."

Reminds me of , as well as #11 in this list.

(I'd love to scale that image to the same size as the text, but I don't know if Lemmy's markdown supports it.)

Just letting you know I appreciate that you used the actual "χ" instead of just "X" when referring to the letter Chi.

My argument for this is that gift is pronounced with a hard g, why would removing the t change anything. I think SW was trolling. But you want to know what’s totally bonkers? My coworker pronounced Git with a soft g. WTF my dude?

Gi (martial arts uniform) and gin

Gel and geld

Agreed. I think since the “G” stands for “graphics” it should be pronounced like the G in graphics.

But why? We don't pronounce any other acronyms like that, so why treat GIF different? The U in SCUBA isn't pronounced like it is in Underwater. The first A in CAPTCHA isn't pronounced the same as in Automated and the CH isn't split up to be pronounced like Computer and Human. The second A in NASA isn't pronounced like in Administration and the I in PIN doesn't get pronounced like Identification.

We read acronyms as their own words, not as a collection of the first sounds of each constituent word.

🤷 just cause?

Also, “gift”

Have any examples where the first letter of the acronym isn’t pronounced the same? (I’m sure there are some)

UFO, not that that’s a super relevant question if we’re already admitting that our opinions are “just cause.” I think at that point the better question is “if just cause, why is there such a split in opinions?”

I think the reason GIF is so contentious is that if we can there’s a tendency to make acronyms sound like words if possible. FUBAR and SCUBA are pronounced the way they are because we’re trained from words like tuba to see the UBA and use a long U. Something like “oofo” (or “uh-fo” as you would likely argue) for UFO sounds like half a word, hence pronouncing the letters individually. The thing about GIF is that both pronunciations sound like a word, and so both feel valid enough that there can be a split in opinions. Any arguments one way or the other is just trying to justify a gut feeling about which way is “proper.”

To be fair, UFO is an initialism, not an acronym. But at the same time, if it was, I think it'd still be an example, because we'd likely pronounce the U like "oo" (as in "boo"), lol

Nearly all acronyms are technically initialisms

Nah, there's plenty of both, even mixed in very similar subject matter. Example:

An ATM (initialism) takes a card then asks you for its PIN (acronym).

Tbf, you're pointing out the vowels which make the sounds needed to pronounce the acronym as a word. But I get it, either way, we're pronouncing the word as a standalone word.

Right in the same neighborhood... Jpeg (photographic)

I always respond that in that case, "jpeg" should be pronounced "jfeg".

There are so many other acronyms where you don't pronounce every letter the same as their constituent words, I don't understand why GIF is the one people have a problem with accepting. SCUBA, NASA, CAPTCHA, OWCA, etc.

All of those help the pronunciation of the "word". I've no clue what OWCA is, but for the others they didn't change the very first letter that's for kinda the most important in the phrase. It's an image file, and they make it impossible to directly and verbally connect to the meaning of GRAPHICAL.

I'm not trying to fire on a hill for a pronunciation of an acronym just for my preference of g instead of j. But the absolute most important word in that phrase is graphical, and therefore the g noise absolutely has to be included and that is that for that argument. You don't kill off the main character for some worse than Scrappy Doo schmuck.

And in what world are gif and jif better or worse sounding than each other for this to even have a point? It's like whoever decided on making this fake j solely intended and only cared about making the meaning of it harder to figure out and less representative of its meaning.

Since this reply is about gif I'm mostly done, but as a quick point, for the other examples-

For SCUBA, I'm pretty sure it's just pronounced wrong because fixing that would mess up the letters if they made it work by English rules (there would need to be 2 "B"s). So the argument comes down to making it an acronym or making a new word inspired by the acronym.

NASA is actually the same thing, with a pretty similar change that would be needed. (but 2 "S"s this time)

If both of these could just add a word their problems would be fixed and everyone would be happy.

CAPTCHA I'm only vaguely aware is an acronym and I'm not looking that up right now for sanity reasons (all these hills exploding in this thread giving me PTSD). So I don't know how I feel about that one yet. But one day I'll get curious and look at it.

Laser needs the vowels to change, but there's no reason to change the S.

Also .JIF is already a file format and as far as I know, it's pronounced, "jif" just like it looks. So if "gif" and "jif" are supposed to be pronounced the same way, then why do we even have the letter J? Fuck the letter C too while we're at it, get a unique sound, you bastard letter.

https://fileinfo.com/extension/jiff

Oh wow that's actually a really good point!

Now prepare for it to be dismissed! People are too dug in at this point, there's no going back. The trenches have been dug.

It IS spelled that way

The inventor of the GIF pronounces it with a soft G

Geoffrey

Giraffe

Gymnasium

There are plenty of examples of that pronunciation

I have the opposite view, but I thought it would be too incendiary a topic to bring up...

The thing is, that argument doesn't really hold up, because g in English has two major pronunciations.

English being a bad language doesn't excuse incorrect pronunciations. And if your argument was to hold any water, it'd be pronounced jraphics.

What a coincidence! This is my favorite hill to troll people on!

It's absolutely meaningless, it just doesn't matter, and people are sooo opinionated about it!

Jod Himself could descend from heaven, and decree “actually it’s pronounced jif…” And I’d still continue pronouncing it gif.

If it were meant to be pronounced 'giff' as in 'goober', it would have been spelled that way. You decide to turn an initialism into an acronym, you get what you get.

I would like to buy you a nice jift

Fair enough, LOL, though the second half of my comment still holds. I also need to buy some gin for my giraffe.

I hope it's a giraffe

Giraffics Interchange Format or Graphics Interchange Format? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF

Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus or Self Contained Oonderwater Breathing Apparatus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuba_diving)

That's the problem with this debate, for every argument, the counter argument is just the same thing but a different example! The only argument that remains is "the creator said so" vs "so what he's lame"

It always WAS an acronym. That's the entire point of the argument. "G"raphics "I"nterchange "F"ormat.

Nobody turned it into an acryonym, it just IS an acronym. That's not an opinion, it's a fact. The reason it's pronounced with a hard G is because Graphics is a hard G.

And Photographic is pronounced as /f/, yet we don't insist on JPhEG or JFEG. Language is weird, and people often decline to create an acronym from a set of initials that could theoretically be one ("CIA"), or make an acronym where it may not initially seem natural ("HMMWV").

Choosy nerds choose gif, soft G. :-)

It's my favourite battle. And when the war against AI comes, it'll be because the AI will make a final decision and then decide the other side needs to be ultimately defeated.

but g followed by i or e very regularly makes a soft g in English (and always makes a soft g in Italian, which is irrelevant I guess but I speak both). you may as well purposely mispronounce giraffe, gelatin, germ, Giorgio, giant, gentle, etc while you're at it since it they don't start with a j.

by english rules it very often is a soft g, but could be hard as well, but the creator has clarified multiple times it is meant to be soft, so why are people fighting it?

gift

pan / pang

hat / hate

clam / claim

one letter can and often does completely change pronunciation. i'd give you a good ol' fashion makin fun of, but i actually think you could've gotten there if you would've thought about for a few more seconds. you seem pretty smart. shame you clicked reply too soon.

You're on the wrong side of history, get over it.

in terms of how people refer to it these days, you may be correct that slightly more are using the hard g. what drives me nuts about the argument though is that the 'hard g' crowd does not have a good argument for it. the "g stands for graphics so it should be a hard g" crowd are immediately proven wrong that that's not how any acronyms work. the "gift" crowd are immediately proven wrong as i just did above.

just be honest with yourselves. the only argument you have is "we just like it better". if you were honest then i wouldn't be able to argue against it.

Gift is by far the most commonly used word that is comparable, and it is a very close comparison, it makes sense people would base it off that. I'm a soft g person myself, but the one letter change doesn't hold up very well here. All your examples have an additional letter specifically to change how another letter is pronounced using well established rules. That is not the case here at all.

Pan/pang- the g has a well established rule to change the pronunciation of the a? No it doesn't lol. Words are not comparable like that in english, this is another terrible argument.

Examples: lead and lead, read and read, tear and tear, bass and bass, wind and wind. Spelled the exact same way and different pronunciations. Trying to prove how gif is pronounced based on the word gift just proves you haven't thought about this for more than 10 seconds.

There is no grammatical argument for hard g. There is also no grammatical argument for soft g. Once again, g followed by i or e can be either in English. The only thing that should sway this is what the creator intended and straight up told everybody many times.

I don't pronounce those A sounds any differently, I didn't realize that was your point. Maybe there's a bit of a glide in pan, but both have æ sounds.

If it was supposed to be pronounced jiraffe or jin, it would've been spelled that way, i don't care all these idiots say.