Yeah, that was interesting read
@Akrasian 
The pronunciation;
The creators of the format pronounced the acronym GIF as /dʒɪf/, with a soft g as in 'gin'. Wilhite stated that the intended pronunciation deliberately echoes the American peanut butter brand Jif, and CompuServe employees would often quip "choosy developers choose GIF", a spoof of Jif's television commercials.[11] The word is now also widely pronounced /ɡɪf/, with a hard g as in 'gift'.[12] In 2017, an informal poll on the programming website Stack Overflow showed some numerical preference for the hard-g pronunciation,[13] especially among respondents in eastern Europe, though both the soft g and pronouncing each letter individually were found to be popular in Asia and parts of Africa.[14]
Dictionary.com[15] cites both, indicating /dʒɪf/ as the primary pronunciation, while Cambridge Dictionary of American English[16] offers only the hard-g pronunciation. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary[17] and Oxford Dictionaries cite both pronunciations, but place the hard g first: /ɡɪf, dʒɪf/.[18][19][20][21] The New Oxford American Dictionary gave only /dʒɪf/ in its second edition[22] but updated it to /dʒɪf, ɡɪf/ in the third edition.[23]
The disagreement over the pronunciation has led to heated Internet debate. On the occasion of receiving a lifetime achievement award at the 2013 Webby Awards ceremony, Wilhite publicly rejected the hard-g pronunciation;[12][24][25] his speech led to more than 17,000 posts on Twitter and dozens of news articles.[26] The White House[12] and the TV program Jeopardy! also entered the debate in 2013.[25]
In February 2020, The J.M. Smucker Company, the owners of the Jif brand, partnered with the animated image database and search engine Giphy to release a limited-edition "Jif vs. GIF" (hashtagged as #JIFvsGIF) jar of peanut butter that had a label humorously declaring the soft-g pronunciation to refer exclusively to the peanut butter, and GIF to be exclusively pronounced with the hard-g pronunciation.[27]
