Petty rant

[owlmoose]

I don't know why this bothers me so much, but I am so, so tired of this idea that pronouncing "gif" as "jif" is the most ridiculous thing ever "because it starts with a G".

Giraffe, gin, ginger, gigantic, gif.

Both are legitimate pronunciations, arrived at by different linguistic reasoning, so can we please just accept that and move on, instead of flooding Tumblr with stupid text posts and macros and other nonsense?

Comments

[sarasa_cat]

I wish it was easier to set up tumblr with the "filter out everything I really could't care less about" option turned on.

[owlmoose]

This is less a Tumblr rant and more a "people are annoying me with their limited view of language" rant -- I've seen similar comments on Facebook and other places. And there'd be no earthy way to block this kind of thing anyway.

[sarasa_cat]

Yes. This.

[jerkface]

Agreed. 'Tis a silly thing.

[owlmoose]

Right? I mean, I get that it's partially a backlash to the creator of the word saying that he meant it to be pronounced "jif", but the hard g is actually in the majority, and it's not as though there's any kind of battle to be won.

[radish]

Soon enough spoken language will cease to be used anywhere on Earth, and it won't matter how our ancestors pronounced anything at all.

[owlmoose]

But then how will we know how to say it in our heads? :)

[ossobuco]

Oh my gosh, this! And when people use words that start with G NOT followed by an I... okay, no, restraining myself, bad linguaphile.

I have feelings about what is "correct", but the idea of correctness in language is so strange and so often fallacious that I don't really care, I just wish both camps would ease off each other. We both understand what the other means when they say it (and most of us are typing it at each other, anyway), so everybody calm down. D:

[owlmoose]

I think I know *exactly* the post you are talking about and it makes me roll my eyes SO HARD.

I have an opinion, too, but I like to think that's beside the point here. As long as we all understand, it doesn't matter, so why the relentless struggle over it? Bleh.