The creator of the format, Steve Wilhite, pronounced it with a soft “g.” Apparently this pronunciation is even specified in the tech specs for the format. He was riffing on a Jif peanut-butter advertising slogan, “Choosy mothers choose Jif,” by saying “Choosy programmers choose GIF.”
If you insist that “GIF” be pronounced with a hard g, because of some misguided insistence that acronyms must follow the pronunciation of the expanded phrase, missing the joke, AND ignoring the tech specs, for God’s sake, then I will insist that you also use the following pronunciations:
COVID: | ˌkōvīd | (“covyde”), as the “VI” is short for virus, with a long i.
SCUBA: | ˈskəbə | (“skubba”), as the U stands for “underwater,” which is pronounced with a short u.
LASER: | ˈlasir | (“lasseer”), as the A stands for amplfication (short a), the S for simulated (“sss” not “zzz”), and the E stands for emission (usually a long e, but debatable, okay)
YOLO: | ˈyōlwə | (“yole-wuh”) as the final O stands for “once”, with the o taking on a wuh sound.
POTUS: | ‘pätyo͞os | (“pot-use”) as the O stands for “office” (ah) and the U stands for “United” (you).
4.75/5 @thestorygraph for "The Oxford Dictionary of Etymology" Durkin's passion for his subject shines through and lifts the quality of his writing, from beginning
"I would like to thank the dedicatees of this book ("my parents") for tolerating a child’s at times rather obsessive interest in very old documents and even older words."
to end
"like all the best intellectual pursuits, once the bug is caught, it is likely to remain with one for life." #AmReading#ebooks#etymology@bookstodon
TFW a paragraph about #English names in a book on etymology puts a snippet of #German poetry you last read 30+ years ago into your head: "Es war einmal ein lattenzaun mit zwischenraum, hindurchzuschaun" (Bonus points for any who know why the poem always reminds me of Emo Philips😀) #AmReading#etymology#nonfiction#poetry#Deutsch#ebooks#Kobo@bookstodon
The #Dutch word for harvest is 'oogst'. The double O in there is pronounced as a long O, which may give you a clue to its origin: it is derived from the name of the month August, traditionally a time of harvest.
Funnily enough, the Dutch word for autumn is 'herfst'. You guessed it: that's related to the English harvest. It originally referred to the time of harvesting. In English it came to refer to harvesting itself, in other languages to the season of autumn.
It means "splendid or excellent," and although there are a few theories about its original source, its use was "reinforced by Duesenberg, the expensive, classy make of automobile from the 1920s-30s."
The original black Friday had nothing to do with shopping and everything to do with dread.
Listen to this week's Grammar Girl podcast while you cook or travel. Then impress your family tomorrow with stories about the origin of "black" idioms including "black Friday," "black sheep," "blackball," and more!
"Following" up a bit of paper book reading with some real fun - a whole page on the origin of "procession" from "Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English" #AmReading#ebooks#Linguistics#etymology@bookstodon
This morning's early awakening brought to you by the word "motherlode" because I used a derivation of it yesterday. In the pale hours, Mr Brain pops up with "what exactly is a lode? Is it the same as in lodestone?"
Turns out 'lode' in Middle English was a 'carrying path', so all about direction. A lodestone gave the path to magnetic north; miners thought veins of minerals looked like roads; and best of all your live-lihood (lode hiding in variant spelling) was your path through life
TIL "The name Zotero reportedly derives from the Albanian word zotëroj, which means "to learn something extremely well, that is to master or acquire a skill in learning" (Source: Mark Dingemanse, 2008, Etymology of Zotero)."
Today I learned "handiwork" isn't derived from "handy work". It's from old English where a prefix was used to add a sense of something completed. So "iwerk" was completed work, and handiwork is work accomplished by hand.
I just heard someone say "chocker block" instead of "chock-a-block." That's a new one to me.
A chock is a piece or block of wood, and "chock-a-block" is a nautical term "said of two blocks of tackle run so closely that they touch," according to Etymonline.
I was today years old when I learned "parking" literally used to refer to civic green space lining the roads
So every time you say parking you're directly referencing a thing that was lost during the automobile's aggressive and costly takeover of public spaces
I came across another phrase with a fun origin this weekend: "over the transom."
A transom is cross-beam, such as the beam at the top of a door.
Here's the quotation from an editor at "Atlantic Monthly" that Etymonline has for the origin:
"Mr. Weeks once said that some very interesting material comes from writers who, too shy to walk in and talk to the editor, just toss their manuscripts over the transom and run."
The real story behind Black Friday (from 2011) (www.motherjones.com)
web archive link...
Untrustworthy fruits (startrek.website)