The bigger and more square the brownie pan (total surface area), the worse the ratio of edge to center pieces. If the brownie making evolves to larger and larger square-ish pans, it is imperative that the ratio of center to edge preferrers adjusts similarly, otherwise you edge folk will find yourself hungry.
A more better option would be "like Gin or like Ginkgo" because it makes it obvious that the "gift has a hard G, therefore..." people have made a mistake.
So many people come up with so many fake rules for why it should have a hard G, but there are only two real rules for names, and, yes, GIF is a name (of a format). 1) If the named thing can't speak for itself, the people who named it dictate how the name is pronounced. 2) If it can speak for itself, it dictates. Nobody who isn't the named thing or its namer(s) gets to say how its name is pronounced regardless of what they think of the spelling.
> because it makes it obvious that the "gift has a hard G, therefore..." people have made a mistake.
That's obvious anyway; gift is one word (well, also give) swamped in a sea of other gi- words.
And gift is a very strange one. What is it, a loan from Norse? You'd think, if it were a native word, that it would have turned into something more like "yift", the way we see in e.g. day, I, or yard.
In my opinion this is only true until the "unplanned" usage becomes mainstream. Language is always evolving. Once the majority is using the g sound from "gift" not "gin", the majority rule is correct, even though they would have been initially incorrect.
Consider the changes of people's names as they migrated around the world. In NZ, we pronounce Craig as "Crayg", in the US they pronounce it "Creg", which I struggle to make sense of, but that doesn't make it wrong. There are better examples than Craig but that was the first one that came to mind.
You mean that saying Craig->Creg is wrong? It's always bothered me and it's very jarring, but if you grew up being called Creg, then it wouldn't be wrong. But it sounds so wrong to me.
I feel like it doesn't make sense, because then Greg should be spelled Graig, but that's the whole point, language evolves in an inconsistent way, and the only defining point of correct pronunciation is really "how do the majority of people say it", and that is often only a regional thing too.
Either way, the assertion that because something is a name it cannot evolve in pronunciation is easily disproved.
There are only 2 rules for making up arbitrary rules on the internet. 1) The person making up the rule can demand the rule be followed. 2) People will do what they want regardless of the earnestness of the arbitrary internet rule maker.
Nah. People don't get to change the rules. I can't tell you my name is spelled K-Y-L-E and insist it is pronounced "Mark". GIF is a crappy image format. JIF is peanut butter.
> I can't tell you my name is spelled K-Y-L-E and insist it is pronounced "Mark"
Not the same thing at all. This is more like someone following different pronunciation rules insisting that your name as spelled is pronounce "Kee-lay"; and if you actually want "Kaa-il", you should spell it K-A-I-L instead. It kind of makes sense that way too, as long as the rules are somewhat consistent in their version.
If the creator wanted to name it after Jif, the extension and name should have both been JIF. Putting in a G instead of a J is begging to create confusion about the pronunciation.
That's actually quite funny, I would say gist is pronounced jist but only because it's clearly a play on the word "jist" in the first place. Like a branded version of a generic term - like tumblr where we all know it's actually tumbler rather than tumblr but with a different pronounciation due to copyright.
It’s not over. The whole reason we fight in debates is to convince people to join our side or make sure people on our side stay convinced. It is a never ending battle and only the dead have seen the end of wars.
Unlike all the other questions which are subjective or philosophical, it’s gif with a J for f*s sake. It’s what we called it in the 80s, it’s what the creator called it, it’s Jif goddamnit.
People for some reason think that they get to decide how to pronounce a name rather than the creator of the name. Oh well. Its an easy way to determine someone's level of internet knowledge.
If someone has a regular-looking name yet tells you their name is pronounced differently (and knows that it is irregular), would you say their name the way they want you to, or would you insist on saying it the regular way?
I’d say their name the way they wanted to, because I’m not an asshole. But I don’t think that’s as much of a contradiction as you think it is. It’s a great example of how language evolves.
I know that was your point and I said I knew it in my response. But it’s not prescriptivism. It’s proscribed, and that’s different. Accepting that someone’s name is linguistically different than the rules you expect it to follow is both not being an asshole and descriptivism in practice. The fact that it’s proscribed is just a testament that it’s important to the person who prompted you to accept that particular language evolution.
So it seems you are saying it only makes sense to describe prescriptivism as explicitly calling for conformity to an existing norm.
There seem to be plenty of people who will argue to conserve grammar/spelling/semantics etc. I can't say their work is unfruitful, yet it does seem to be the case that language follows the habits of the majority.
That's not how language evolves. I'm sure you don't pronounce every French word that was assimilated into English with a French accent / pronunciation.
I'm pretty sure that Matthaios, Markos, Loukas and Ioannes would not recognize their own names in the present-day English pronunciations (well, Mark and Luke might, but John would certainly not).
Come to St. Louis where everyone mispronounces the French street names. Doug Crockford coined JSON as "Jason", but nearly every developer I've ever run into says "jaysawn", so that's how I say it too.
And? That's only relevant if it's their own name, or potentially if something falls under the purview of the Académie Française, and even then, that requires you to care what the Academy thinks.
There is more than one canonical way to pronounce things, even names. For example, what's the correct way to pronounce Arkansas?
The real issue here is people trying to assert there is only one correct way to pronounce it.
You realize you are actually arguing in favour of calling it like jiffy right? Because a direct reading of knife makes it kunifuh, and a direct reading of gif makes it the incorrect pronounciation as well.
Frankly, I reserve my right to not care and have fun with language -- instead of being a curmudgeon (there's no point except to feel better about oneself).
This is just like the scsi debate a geographical issue. Internet is world wide so you will have people from all over the world pronouncing things their own way. And that way is the only right way, the hard g.
Correct. Jraphics Interchange Format. :P. My friends and I called it Gif-with-a-hard-G all through the (late) 80s (edit: more like the 90s, but anyway) and unlike now, nobody corrected us then. I never heard the format’s creator pronounce it though.
You do you, but Graphics having a hard G doesn't force GIF to any more than the Amplification in LASER forces the pronunciation of its A, or Stimulated its S, or Emission its E. Or do you and your friends also say "lasseer" instead of "layzur"? This is an arbitrary choice you've made in one case but not the other.
Might depend on where you live, but where I am the "er" in "laser" is like anything the "-er" for almost all words with that ending, but the "e" in "emission" is like the "i" in "igloo" (or like the second "i" in "emission").
Should we also pronounce the K in knight the way we used to? English and its pronunciation are democratic, it's about the way it's used by people - it doesn't matter what it was originally or what the inventor thinks. Trying to fight it just ignores the way English has always changed over time. Gif pronounced with a G or a J are both valid - because that's the way people say it.
Actually, the chicken and the egg one is the least subjective on the list. There is only one correct answer. The egg came first. Its called evolution. At some point, a chicken like creature laid an egg, and the egg hatched into what we know as a chicken. A chicken like creature didn't transform into a chicken while it was alive.
Hmmm, that was my reasoning as well, but now that I think about it... does the egg belong to the creature that laid it or the creature that hatches out of it?
A chicken egg is not synonymous with an egg cell, or ovum. The fertilized ovum of course belongs to the creature it will grow into -- it is the creature it will grow into -- and so certainly the chicken ovum came before -- or at the same time as -- the chicken. But when we say "egg" we are referring to the vessel with a shell that houses the fertilized ovum until it hatches. [1]
This vessel is made of of various proteins and nutrients, produced by the mother that laid the egg, and a calcium carbonate shell, also made entirely by the mother. This egg, created entirely by the mother and not by the union of an ovum and sperm cell and any mutations that happened then, belongs entirely to the mother.
If Proto-chicken mother has laid clutch after clutch of eggs, all those are proto-chicken eggs. When one of those clutches happens to have a mutant that we arbitrarily declare is a "chicken," the egg itself has not changed in any way, only the DNA of the organism housed in the egg.
So, on thinking about it, I want to go back and change my answer.
As you can see by the results of the survey, you are indeed in the minority here. It is a hard-G. Anachronisms and appeals to authority (the originator's preference) bear little weight here - a word is added to a language on consensus, and most of us prefer that hard-G. Furthermore, since the G represents the hard-G word 'Graphic' it only makes sense.
Subjectively, I feel that the soft-G is milquetoast mild to the degree that it's unpleasant to say or hear. Insipid like a cold bland porridge. Hard-G has all the zest, all the pizazz!
There's also a cleaning product named "Jif" in Australia. Saying "Gif" as "jif" seems very redundant - why even have different letters?
Though it does seem to be an American thing - we pronounce the H in pretty much all words too, whereas Americans tend to make a lot of "H" sounds silent.
> There's also a cleaning product named "Jif" in Australia
And a peanut butter in the US. So what?
> Saying "Gif" as "jif" seems very redundant - why even have different letters?
English is...rather unconcerned with having an absence of duplication of sounds between letters (“c” and “x” are pretty much completely redundant with other letters, and there are plenty of overlaps on the other letters in represented sounds.)
> a word is added to a language on consensus, and most of us prefer that hard-G.
To the extent this is true, it's only in a sense where consensus is much more than mere majority preference and it's absence, and thus the absence of a single correct pronunciation, is also possible and, in fact, common; for GIF, there is an absence of consensus on pronunciation, and thus a diversity of pronunciations with shifting popularity. Your preference may be the eventual consensus, but English can maintain words with multiple pronunciations with shifting popularity over a very long term without settling to general consensus, so maybe not.
People can call it whichever they want. If you say gif or jif and someone else corrects you then they're just being dumb. Clearly they understood what you meant and until consensus is almost unanimous (around 90-99%) both pronunciations are fine. I also don't think the creator's pronunciation matters. If they originally said it should be pronounced jife but people were between jif and gif then saying either jif and gif would make sense in conversation but jife wouldn't.
How can you call it lack of consensus when it’s 80-20, especially considering it’s an extremely skewed sample (techies are way more likely to pronounce it jif)
I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G
> (techies are way more likely to pronounce it jif)
Oh? Why do you say that? I mean, I doubt knowing what the creator said has that big of an impact but maybe I'm wrong on that.
> I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G
Show me a poll that doesn't tell you the answer in the options. When one of the answers is "gif", and it wins as the pronunciation for "gif", that's a useless result.
I was saying it long before hearing anything about the inventor.
When you say 'no prompting', you mean just finding it in text with no context? Hell if I know whether people blindly guess it's like "give" or "gin" but neither one seems super obvious over the other unless you treat it like it's derived from the word "gift".
If you say it in front of someone and they possibly correct you, I don't know why the techy version would differ from the average person version.
I meant that the average techie person is much more likely to know what the creator intended for the pronunciation and are therefore more likely to say jif
I personally don't know anyone who'd pronounce it with a j sound and I severely doubt anyone in my country would default to a j sound, but I'm open to that being cultural. I just think the fact that hard G wins by such a landslide is pretty good evidence that defaulting to a j sound is incredibly rare
Ah, so you aren't saying a majority of techies will use 'jif' (which is I think what many are reading from "techies are way more likely to pronounce it jif"), but just that they are more likely than non-techies to do so, given the prior knowledge. Fair.
A 20/80 split in a poll in a world in which lots of people are correcting others towards a hard G indicates that there's plenty of people choosing to pronounce it like "gin" or "gist" or "gelatin" or "genius" or "generous" or "genetic" or "giant" or "gymnast" or "ginger" or ...
Sure, but a 20/80 split is not enough of a consensus to claim that the "jif" pronunciation is entirely wrong, rather than an accepted alternative. With that kind of ratio, there will be areas where "jif" is the accepted pronunciation.
> How can you call it lack of consensus when it’s 80-20,
Because, even if this were a valid (random sample of the target population) survey, 1 in 5 is a lot, especially given the fact that the distribution of pronunciation is not homogeneous geographically or by other divides that define distinct subgroups of language use.
> I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G
I think the existence of ongoing debate among speakers of the language as to the correct pronunciation is strong evidence that there is no consensus.
>Anachronisms and appeals to authority (the originator's preference) bear little weight here - a word is added to a language on consensus
If you watch Back to the Future (which came out in 1985), Dr Brown pronounces gigawatts as jigawatts, and now the common pronunciation has a hard G. It has the same initial gi-, so I guess sometime in the 1990's the trend was to prefer hard G over soft G in technical words which start with gi-.
Back to the Future is only evidence of what that actor or the film's creator believed. It's not a well-researched documentary.
The original pronunciation is with a hard g, though there was a brief period after the US National Bureau of Standards claimed otherwise where some people in America thought otherwise. At least according to [0].
>In 1998, a poll by the phonetician John C. Wells found that 84% of Britons preferred the pronunciation of gigabyte starting with /ɡɪ/ (as in gig), 9% with /dʒɪ/ (as in jig)
Roughly every 10th person pronouncing it with a soft G doesn't sound like an "anomaly" of a single movie to me (as claimed in the quora post), more like a less common variant.
>It's not a well-researched documentary.
Of course, it's not. But it gives us audio evidence that some people in the 1980's pronounced it with a soft G (or thought it's pronounced with a soft G because they wouldn't usually use -- and hear -- the word IRL, just like with GIF's)
But if you don't live in an English-speaking country, then "what the creator called it" doesn't even matter. So for the vast majority of people this argument is irrelevant; you generally don't code-switch into English pronunciation for a loanword from another language, especially for an acronym.
The question obviously doesn't mean any egg, it is asking about chicken eggs. But the question still always seemed ambiguous to me only because the terms are vague. If you define a chicken egg as an egg that was laid by a chicken, then it is the chicken first. If you define it as an egg that a chicken was hatched from, then it was the egg first. Define your terms and the question is simple to answer.
But it's not about the definition, because the definition mentioned is not correct anymore than saying the definition is if the egg was laid on a Sunday.
> If you define a chicken egg as an egg that was laid by a chicken
Species are assumed to produce eggs of the same species. Like many convenient turns of phrase, this isn't strictly true. What the egg contains (unless the egg casing is a relevant attribute) is how it is characterized.
A mutation exists in the developing embryo, so a non-chicken had a chicken-containing egg. This is a chicken egg, which necessarily came first. Looking at any given xenopregnancy (a hybrid Liger, or panda fetus in a cat, et al). The carrying species does not make the result of that species. eg If there was a non-chicken species (say, a turkey) which produced eggs that were genetically and practically identical to chicken-containing eggs, they would be called chicken eggs.
I mean that's a bit over-simplistic... It's not that a nonchicken lays a chicken egg, that implies an either/orness of chickenhood that would be radically unique. What actually happened was that at around 10,000 years ago a group of birds similar to modern red junglefowl either migrated or was forcibly taken from northern Thailand to the Indian subcontinent, where they started mating with the local birds similar to grey junglefowl with whom they were still able to interbreed. If you call those each 99%-chickens each then you had a steady meeting of two 99%-chicken lines interbreeding until they formed something steadily closer to our 100%-chicken lines, but presumably also creating 98%-chickens etc. in their breeding population. The variation inside the breeding population is larger than the distance of the progenitor populations to the final result.
Viewed this way, what actually caused chickens to happen was the migration, not the genetics. It was the part where the two red junglefowl groups came out of genetic contact and started to diverge. On the assumption that these red junglefowl were adults (which is obvious if it was a migration, but merely likely if it was forced by humans), this means that a population of non-chickens was divided into two subpopulations, one of which was chickens, one of which wasn't.
So even agreeing that we should categorize the egg by the creature it produced immediately after hatching, you still get by this argument that a nonchicken egg hatched into a nonchicken which by circumstance became a chicken... Chickens came first, and then their chicken eggs.
Suppose you have a definition of a chicken that is rigorous enough to break any ties. Then the first chicken that meets this definition was hatched from an egg. That egg was laid by a non-chicken (some animal that was very close to, but not exactly, a chicken). So the egg came first.
Obviously "the egg that the chicken hatched from" came first, no one's debating that. But that's all you've said.
If the question is "which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg", then it depends on whether the chicken egg is one that houses the chicken, or the one that is laid by a chicken.
Would you really argue that those eggs hatching into mules are not mule eggs?
I could see an argument that those eggs, coming out of canaries, could count as canary eggs, but not in a way that stops them from being mule eggs. "mule eggs" definitely needs to include the eggs that hatch into mules.
Even with this perfect definition there are still ambiguities.
You could still debate if a non-chicken egg with chicken DNA is a chicken egg. Its shell and yolk, all contents, were produced by a non-chicken - imagine the eggshell was blue, not white, and the final allele change to become “chicken” switched the “egg color laid once grown” to white.
If all this eggs contents were produced by a genetically non-chicken - the egg is blue - is it really a “chicken egg”?
Imagine you took a chicken egg, and modified the DNA so that an elephant would hatch. Is this a “chicken egg (with elephant DNA)” or an “elephant egg (with shell, white, and yolk produced by a chicken)”?
So in case you missed what is wrong with that, what is wrong with that is that you have a very checkered history of chickenhood.
Viewed your way, a chicken actually gave birth to a nonchicken who gave birth to a nonchicken who gave birth to a chicken who gave birth to a nonchicken who gave birth to a chicken that was finally the mother of an unbroken line of hens that survives to this day, some of whom had nonchicken fathers.
The problem is that the variation of the breeding population is much larger than the distance from the originals to the final result.
A chicken was once a fertilized egg cell, but an "egg" is the vessel that contains the zygote [1], and was created entirely by the mother (i.e. it is not a result of fertilization). So a chicken was once in an egg.
Huh? No, I'm saying something very specific that you may have missed.
Many people in this thread are using the word "egg" in the same way as a female mammal releases an "egg" in estrus, i.e. the cell which will become an organism once fertilized. Hence the discussion elsewhere of how the mutation has already happened in this cell.
For instance, besides this thread, another person said "resulting in the very first chicken ever. Which of course started out as an egg.
I'm saying that a bird "egg", from the Wikipedia link, is not the gamete cell but rather simply the container, created by the mother.
So statements such as "[the chicken] started out as an egg" or "a chicken was once an egg" (your statement) are simply incorrect, just as saying "a human baby was once a uterus" is wrong.
It's not pedantic "for no reason" (at least any more than the rest of this by-definition pedantic discussion is).
Let me try to steel-man it, then: the "egg" may be taken to refer to the "eggs laid by chickens", in which case there necessarily was a chicken before the first chicken-laid egg.
And that's the best I can do. But it's silly, because that interpretation of the question has an extremely obvious answer, which implies that this is _not_ the intended meaning of the question -- if the structure of the question contains the required answer, then you wouldn't bother asking that question at all.
So we're right back at of course the bloody egg came first.
Now, to make it more messy. Are we talking about Chicken egg or Chicken's egg? That is an egg which from chicken came from or egg produced by a chicken? In first case, chicken egg came from non-chicken, in later case only chicken can produce one...
Maybe it should've been Eggs or That Which laid the Egg...
To expand to dinosaurs, chickens, and Bronteroc's.
Assuming there's just chickens, and we're talking just about chicken eggs, then the chicken came first. Chickens need a mother to hatch the egg, to create the egg in it's womb, etc. An egg cannot exist without a mother to birth it.
How did the chicken come about though? If we define chicken as exactly what we have today, that means it must have been born in a hard shelled egg.
I'm assuming that evolution would happen slowly over time, the creature that ended up becoming the chicken would have had to already been laying eggs. The egg laying feature would need to already be present for it to be our modern day preciously defined chicken.
Is your answer the same if the question is about a person instead of straw?
Both possible answers are technically correct, because "hole" has at least two relevant definitions: (1) a hollow space inside something, (2) an aperture connecting two spaces. A straw has one #1 type hole, and two #2 type holes.
#2 is probably more practically correct, because most of the time when one wants to talk about a straw's holes, it will be the apertures that one wants to talk about not the hollow interior.
When I learned that the entire digestive system is external....my mind exploded... because it's basically an open hole straight through a person and is considered an externality.
A food can be classified by which faces of a cube the outer layer of carbs populate. In the case of a hot dog, it is a taco, since the bottom and two sides are the carb structure.
In the context hotdogs appear, it is around other bread meat combinations:
hotdog
hamburger
sandwich
these are distinct things, and to some they are assumeable identities where one can expect criticism for any choice, despite their overlapping feature sets
You can happily ignore anyone who says hot dogs aren't sandwiches. By all definitions, they unquestionably ARE sandwiches. The only argument against it is based on whether a hot dog bun is one piece of bread or two, except it doesn't matter, because one piece of bread (or a split roll) is still a sandwich.
1a: two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between
1b: one slice of bread covered with food
By the anti-sandwich lobby's logic, if you were to build a ham and cheese sandwich using one piece of bread and then folded it in the middle to make it look and function like a "traditional" double breaded sandwich, it would somehow magically no longer qualify as a sandwich -- and that's just plain absurd.
(Yes I think a tortilla is a valid bread for this.)
> By the anti-sandwich lobby's logic, if you were to build a ham and cheese sandwich using one piece of bread and then folded it in the middle to make it look and function like a "traditional" double breaded sandwich, it would somehow magically no longer qualify as a sandwich -- and that's just plain absurd.
I don't think it requires magic to say that a sub sandwich is not a true sandwich.
Also those people wouldn't say you had a sandwich to start with. It's reasonable to say that open-faced sandwiches aren't true sandwiches, and I think people would agree that the folded version is either equally or more sandwichy than an open-face.
The question is where the exact threshold lies. Are both sandwiches? Just the folded one? Neither?
Don't get too hung up on the dictionary definition you quoted. Dictionaries are over-inclusive and include very casual language. Spiders are not actually bugs, even though people sometimes use the word that way and you can find it in a dictionary.
> I don't think it requires magic to say that a sub sandwich is not a true sandwich.
It requires the most absurd magic to say that a sub is not a sandwich. It's literally everything that you call a sandwich without any differences whatsoever. It's only nicknamed a "sub" because the shape of the bread resembles a submarine. That's it. Your completely arbitrary limitation of a sandwich being two square-shaped pieces of bread simply doesn't reflect reality.
> Dictionaries are over-inclusive and include very casual language.
The irony is rich, given that you're trying to redefine words to have completely different meanings than the original.
First: When I said the dictionary was over-inclusive, I was implying that your 1b might be wrong. The definition that includes "open faced sandwiches". It's not clear whether those should count. Yes, even though "sandwich" is in the name. Like how a veggie hamburger isn't actually a hamburger. They are an alternate version of a sandwich, on par with a pizza.
Second: I wasn't clear about subs. I thought context would help, but I guess not enough. So, trying again. If you take a loaf and cut it in two, and put stuff in between, everyone will agree that's a sandwich. It's not about the kind of bread or anything. Where some people disagree is when you don't cut the loaf all the way, when you no longer have "pieces of bread" at all.
> The irony is rich
But do you disagree with what I said there about bugs?
Also you didn't answer about tacos. That's not a gotcha, I want to understand how you draw the line and how you interpret the dictionary definition. I don't want to put words in your mouth or guess, and it looks really stupid whenever I make a choose-your-own-adventure argument.
Yes, let's throw out logic and reason in favor of internet satire. That site can be summarized as "take your sandwich, turn it on its side, and BOOM, not a sandwich anymore, bro!" These are world-is-flat arguments.
> Yes, let's throw out logic and reason in favor of internet satire
Arguing the boundaries of arbitrary semantic categories with no significance isn't something “logic or reason” plays a whole lot of role in in any case [0]; what is on display is a whole lot of emotional attachment backed with a abusive language, not “logic and reason”.
[0] Which is, of course, what the site is satirizing.
Three. A hole is a distinct pathway from one open end to another. A regular cylindrical straw is a torus at heart, it has only one way through. A Y-straw would have three paths from its three openings.
That's a question answered by the field of topology: genus 2.
| |
| +--
| +--
| |
Look at it end on:
__
//\\__
|| ||_
\\//
Now shorten the shaft of the right-facing hole so that it becomes a ring-hole on the right side of the end-on hole, then rotate it also so that it's an end-on view:
The correct why to pronounce gif out loud is "image," because who asks for a particular file format, and if you do care about the format of the image, it should be something other than gif.
Gif became part of the vernacular to describe a short looping video clip or animation with no audio that can be easily shared. Nowadays people are often actually sharing mp4s or webms even when they think it’s gif. It’s just a bit of internet heritage, and causes little harm.
Why try to pronounce it at all... Just spell it out as G-I-F.
I get that people want to be lazy but pronouncing acronyms/contractions has always been fraught with disagreement. Same goes for things like SQL (which somehow gets pronounced as "sequel") while people leave PDF alone.
The SQL one is different. It was originally "Structured English Query Language", or SEQUEL. When IBM released it into the public domain, it became SQL, but retained its pronunciation. That's not to say that spelling it out is incorrect—it's at least as correct as "sequel"—just that the "sequel" pronunciation is not arbitrary.
It is very rare to see GIF images these days. 99.9% of the time I hear GIF people are talking about videos (usually short and automatically looping).
The fact that GIF videos are considered an image is really just a quirk of evolution of the image format to support videos and browsers supporting these videos in an <img> tag (and nowhere else).
You can pronounce any word any way you like to. The only reason to pronounce some word a certain way is out of respect. The creators of the gif format called it "jif" as a riff on jif peanut butter. End.
The English call the Thames river Tims. Spanish call Barcelona Barthelona, and Ibiza Ibitha. So I don't put much in native pronounciations. Otherwise, if they are pronouncing it correctly, they need to go back to spelling skool!!
When I lived in Scotland around 25 years ago, many bars in the Highlands advertised the size of their whiskey measures in terms of gills (and I was laughed at for mispronouncing the term!). I'm not sure if it's still common. So for me, it does actually come to mind at least as readily as fish anatomy.
The P in JPEG stands for "photo." You don't pronounce it "jpheg." English isn't a consistent language, and to try to apply consistent pronunciation is a failure in abstract thinking.
The argument over this always frustrates me. People argue about which pronunciation is correct, but for a made-up word, the creator is the only one who can decide what's correct. People are free to ignore the creator's wishes or do something different out of personal preference or disagree about what should be correct, but if the creator pronounced gif "Throatwobbler Mangrove" that'd still be the only thing that counts as "correct".
There is no objectively correct way to pronounce anything. The only correctness that matters is if you were understood correctly. In that case both are correct, but they each are different signals.
Even in normal everyday conversational words let alone tech words. People in New England pronounce words differently than people in Minnesota or the South. Hell, in Texas, syllables are seemingly added to words in our pronunciations.
All words are made up. The creator can certainly suggest whatever pronunciation they think should be used, but if most of the world decides otherwise, tough luck. "Correct" language is whatever language is most widely used and understood by people. Linguistics is a descriptive discipline, not a prescriptive one.
>the creator is the only one who can decide what's correct
When I was young I never understood the French idea of 'the death of the author'. I found the idea of ignoring the author's intentions in writing a novel, and of ignoring their clarifications regarding the novel, quite absurd. In time, I have found myself more on the side of this idea.
An author can create something, but this does not give them dictates over how it is interpreted by the rest of us. Creation need not imply authority over understanding, nor later insights inspired from a work.
I'm not sure the pronunciation of an acronym for an image format quite fits into the concept of literary criticism, but I can't say that I'll ever be too bothered that the original author has had the misfortune of pronouncing their own format incorrectly.
The vast majority of my favorite authors - ergo the ones I'm interested enough in to go looking for their opinions - have explicitly recused themselves from public interpretation.
It's a lose lose for them. Regardless of the pronunciation they declare will effectively anger half of the fans. Debate on one of my novels on the internet so that people are continuously talking about that novel is a good thing. Why wreck it?
This might be somewhat true for English where there are so many odd spellings and exceptions [1] but, in general, there are rules for pronunciation and they are pretty strong for many languages.
We don't see that logic applied for foreign words. People in the USA rarely say croissant correctly, nor mayonnaise, nor manga, etc... I don't expect it will be any different for created words.
The problem is people aren't going to look up the "correct" pronunciation. They're just going to say it how ever it seems like it would be said by reading it in their native language. Once enough people do it it's too late to fix.
An interesting related thing is how people pronounce initials. For example NOP ("No" "Awp" or "Nawp" or "Nope" I had a colleague that pronounced RTS as "ritz". What I find interesting with "ritz" is why the "i". Why not "rats" or "ruts" or "rets" or "rots".
In my domain, graphics, there's GLSL which some people say "Glisle" and "WGSL" which some call "Wigsle". But why not "Glasle" or "Glashal" and "Wagsle"/"Washal". Why did they choose "i". "a" makes more sense given that the letters stand for and if you're going to abandon what the letters stand for, still, why "i" and not some other vowel?
> I had a colleague that pronounced RTS as "ritz". What I find interesting with "ritz" is why the "i". Why not "rats" or "ruts" or "rets" or "rots".
This has an explanation! If a short vowel is inserted as a transition between two consonants, there is a strong tendency for the inserted sound to be a more ‘neutral’ vowel, such as the schwa /ə/. But in many English dialects, there has been a merger [0] between the schwa /ə/ and the short ‘i’ sound /ɪ/ — the two sounds are no longer distinguishable by native speakers of those dialects. Thus, what might be pronounced as [ɹəts] sounds very much like ‘ritz’, and ‘GLSL’ becomes [ɡləzl̩], sounding like ‘Glisle’.
there's some leeway in how to pronounce things but obviously communication requires consensus on how to transmit things or else you can't exchange any information. See two people in very different thick accents trying to speak to each other in the same language.
Language follows patterns for all sorts of reasons. Some of it has to do with priors based on other words, or beliefs about pronunciation and so forth based on other information, or in many cases, the physiology of the throat, mouth, and tongue. People will do whatever they want and it doesn't matter what the originator of a word wanted or intended.
I don't say this out of disrespect; language is a sort of chaotic dynamic group-level system, and what happens initially is only one small input.
The only reason to pronounce some word a certain way is to facilitate communication with other people. It helps to pronounce things the same as the plurality of people you are talking to, to reduce barriers to understanding.
To me it’s gotta be different from “jif” because that’s already a word with a different spelling. I think that’s why there’s a tiebreaker: because “jiff” is already a different word, I jump to “gif”.
How there can be more than two ways to spell words that sound like “to” is just too much. When people do that, I wonder if they’re messing with me or if their minds have fallen prey to a language of many sources. I pray that we will one day have eliminated all of the homophones. Then we will have truly won. Eye think ewe agree…
Well, the creator proposed it to be called "jiff" to specifically reference that word. Because Gifs are compressed, they would download much faster (a jiffy) over slow dialup internet connection than a bmp.
Yes but the creator screwed up in thinking that people were going to read the minutia of their document. The majority of people seeing "gif" with no instruction would use a hard-g. If they know it stands for "Graphics Interchange Format", again they'd use a hard-g. They screwed up (unless their goal was to cause all this endless useless discussion :P)
Is this true? Basically a lot of people in europe will jump to soft g. Will latin america pronounce "gi" as the aspirated H?. Don't know anything about the countries in africa, I hear nigeria is pretty big and there's a lot of tech coming out of there. India (big elephant, pun intended) I suppose is hard g, but what about china -- I have no clue? Japan (120M, almost half the population of US, mind you) is exclusively soft g -- likely because hard g collides with the name of a prefecture (province). Korea I think is hard g (50 m, almost all very tech-savvy). Indonesia?
Pay respect to the author and also to people who use the word and want easy pronunciations so they can spend more time on what's more useful. If, say, our lovely Indian instructors on youtube decide that gif is git but with f, then let it be, for that they are making contributions.
That's not exactly difficult to do, though it would be spelled "draphics".
It's difficult to see what this is supposed to be relevant to; acronyms are never given pronunciations taken from their hidden constituent words. Try to say "stimulated" with a /z/ (as in "LASER").
It bothers me a little that all of your examples are vowels. Especially when you include OSHA in the list of examples. It's not the Shafety and Shealth Administration.
That's a really good point. It seems like most English consonants have roughly one way to pronounce them, particular as a first letter in a word as in an acronym. I guess I should've looked for acronyms built on Ch, Ph, Sh, Th, Wh, Ph, hard or soft C's, and of course hard or soft G's (ginger, gypsy).
Here's a soft G word making a hard G acronym, and a hard G word making a soft G acronyn:
GAD - Generalized Anxiety Disorder
GEMA - Gas and Electric Markets Authority
Some other non-G examples:
PAL - Phase Alternating Line
PAWS - Phased Array Warning System
SWF - ShockWave Flash
There's no meaningful argument on how to pronounce "gif" except "how do people pronounce gif?". Otherwise we're all going to comb through historical records to find out who first said "gift" or "giraffe".
But we can all have preferences, and in some small way be part of the process of pushing English in one direction or another. So here's my pitch for the hard g:
Ambiguous letters are very annoying. I'm teaching my kids to read and it's very frustrating. C is sometimes like sometimes like k (except when k is followed by n) and sometimes like s (except when s is followed by h), unless c is followed by h in which case...you get the idea. We have more sounds than letters, so some ambiguity is required by a sort of pigeonhole principle. It's weird, then, that we have multiple letters for the same sound. A misuse of resources.
But at least C the rules are relatively clean. G is the worst of them, because you really can't tell. Gimble but giant, etc.
So we ought to try to minimize the degree to which this happens because it makes English more approachable for everyone. If you coin a word starting with a "k" sound, start it with a k. And if you want something to start with "j" use a j. (If you want a hard g, you have to use a g, so that's settled already). Then, on the margins, English is slightly more consistent.
With words where there's no consensus, you probably can't change the spelling (and with gif you surely can't) but the same logic applies: pick in the direction of less ambiguity. Since we already have a "j" sound, we should, where possible, make "g" hard.
Ted Kaczynski got caught by preferring to speak the correct way rather than the common way. So you may have a point. In the original Latin alphabet there wasn't even a G letter either. That's why for example CAIVS IVLIVS CAESAR was spelled without a G. If I remember correctly, the G had been invented by his time, but he preferred the traditionalist spelling for his first name, since strictly speaking archaic latin would probably spell his last name Kaesar, but K had fallen out of fashion at that time.
If there are tabs between the code and the comments they won't align if you customize their length. If you use spaces there then you're just hypocritical.
There are just as many arguments pro tabs as there are con tabs
Many could be solved with smart tools. Have your editor reformat the text to your preference. Have it put it back to the project's preference when you check it in.
It doesn't go out the window if you can convince people to do it properly.
I think you might be misunderstanding the alignment comment. The idea is that the lines starting with "function" and "arg4" have the same number of tabs, and then the "arg4" line has nine spaces after the tabs.
Exactly. The right way in this example would be like this (where '>' is a tab and '_' is a space).
(For a better readability and ease of edition, I however prefer to actually indent arguments (each on it's line) rather than the suggested alignment, as I show in the second function)
> Great, so lots of mixed invisible characters in the same line. Yea, that's never caused any problems, cough makefiles, cough python, ...
Of all the ways you could object, I feel like listing makefiles and python might make the least sense. Makefiles require tabs and python has zero problems using tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment. In fact, python will make it harder to accidentally indent a line wrong than almost any other language.
I'd just say people are more likely to screw up, or something like that.
> PS: I know some projects use tabs (go, linux) for example. I don't work on those :P
Linux requires 8 space indentations so it's the worst of all worlds.
I used to feel a way about this, but I honestly don't care anymore. Have your code-formatter deal with it and forget it exists. Even 2 vs 4 barely matters to me anymore as long as the code is formatted/structured in a consistent way.
Sure, fine. I kind of like 3, to be honest. But have you had to deal with 8? My code's already inside a function inside a class. I don't want super wide columns, and I don't want >30 spaces of indentation when I go only two layers deep inside that function.
Further back much of my code was inside a function inside a class inside a namespace...
And code formatters are not usually very good at letting you edit in a different form from the canonical repo format.
Twist them like monkeys do, it is far superior and doesn't need opposable thumbs, so, why are we using our thumbs to open them from the stem and risking the top getting smushed?
509 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] thread* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/39697206-ed-mastery
* https://mwl.io/nonfiction/tools#ed
That's OK. There's a refreshing freedom in being the only sane person around. And the edge brownies are shunned by the herd so there's plenty for us.
That's why I started having vivid conversations with myself.
So many people come up with so many fake rules for why it should have a hard G, but there are only two real rules for names, and, yes, GIF is a name (of a format). 1) If the named thing can't speak for itself, the people who named it dictate how the name is pronounced. 2) If it can speak for itself, it dictates. Nobody who isn't the named thing or its namer(s) gets to say how its name is pronounced regardless of what they think of the spelling.
That's obvious anyway; gift is one word (well, also give) swamped in a sea of other gi- words.
And gift is a very strange one. What is it, a loan from Norse? You'd think, if it were a native word, that it would have turned into something more like "yift", the way we see in e.g. day, I, or yard.
[1] This one's not Norse.
Consider the changes of people's names as they migrated around the world. In NZ, we pronounce Craig as "Crayg", in the US they pronounce it "Creg", which I struggle to make sense of, but that doesn't make it wrong. There are better examples than Craig but that was the first one that came to mind.
I agree with everything you said except that bit, it’s megawrong
I feel like it doesn't make sense, because then Greg should be spelled Graig, but that's the whole point, language evolves in an inconsistent way, and the only defining point of correct pronunciation is really "how do the majority of people say it", and that is often only a regional thing too.
Either way, the assertion that because something is a name it cannot evolve in pronunciation is easily disproved.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenever
...you are aware that "gibbon" isn't pronounced with /dʒ/?
Are you from Wales?
Language is constantly evolving.
I assume they just don’t notice the difference, like with marry/merry/Mary.
Wikipedia agrees that this is common: "In North America it is often pronounced with a short vowel sound /krɛɡ/, as in "egg"" [1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_(given_name)
Not the same thing at all. This is more like someone following different pronunciation rules insisting that your name as spelled is pronounce "Kee-lay"; and if you actually want "Kaa-il", you should spell it K-A-I-L instead. It kind of makes sense that way too, as long as the rules are somewhat consistent in their version.
If the creator wanted to name it after Jif, the extension and name should have both been JIF. Putting in a G instead of a J is begging to create confusion about the pronunciation.
Both patterns exist in the language.
These are both words pronounced really differently, though. Give is a hard 'g' short 'i', jive is a 'j' and a long 'i'.
I'd like to add 'Gaol' or 'Jail'? Debra vs Zebra (These are pronounced differently in the US).
Yes that is my point.
You're implying that there should be a logical correspondence between how English words sound and how they're spelled. I'm not convinced that is true.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gist%2Cjist&ye... makes me wonder just what happened around 1840. I suspect https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Why_the_Little_Frenchman_Wear... (uses jist regularly as a misspelling of just) may have something to do with it.
(what letters are used to describe how the word "gif" should not be pronounced?)
You could pretty easily update the sign to say "it's pronounced gif, not ghif".
Doesn't matter what it was, "G"if is what it is. Who knows what it will be.
This gives us an easy solution to make everyone happy though! We gust have to change "graphics" to be pronounced as "jraphics"
Whether to prescribe language or not is somewhat arbitrary at times and is determined culturally, so I don't think the argument above can be resolved.
There seem to be plenty of people who will argue to conserve grammar/spelling/semantics etc. I can't say their work is unfruitful, yet it does seem to be the case that language follows the habits of the majority.
There is more than one canonical way to pronounce things, even names. For example, what's the correct way to pronounce Arkansas?
The real issue here is people trying to assert there is only one correct way to pronounce it.
No it’s not, plenty of people are very much of aware of the intended pronunciation and still choose to pronounce it another way.
Plus, pronunciations change. I assume you don’t go around demanding people pronounce knife ‘kunifuh,’ right?
Knife used to be pronounced k'nife. This slowly faded over time and is now completely eliminated.
By analog, jif being the original pronunciation is not important because the majority of people have decided to go with a hard G.
In other words, the "correct" spelling or pronunciation of words is democratic.
How about girl as jirl?
Giraffe as jiraffe?
Frankly, I reserve my right to not care and have fun with language -- instead of being a curmudgeon (there's no point except to feel better about oneself).
> Giraffe as jiraffe? ??
"Spoken with the confidence of a man who's been spelling 'giraffe' as 'diraffe' for the last 20 years."
You do you, but Graphics having a hard G doesn't force GIF to any more than the Amplification in LASER forces the pronunciation of its A, or Stimulated its S, or Emission its E. Or do you and your friends also say "lasseer" instead of "layzur"? This is an arbitrary choice you've made in one case but not the other.
The K in knight appears to have turned up in the American pronunciation of "schedule".
A chicken egg is not synonymous with an egg cell, or ovum. The fertilized ovum of course belongs to the creature it will grow into -- it is the creature it will grow into -- and so certainly the chicken ovum came before -- or at the same time as -- the chicken. But when we say "egg" we are referring to the vessel with a shell that houses the fertilized ovum until it hatches. [1]
This vessel is made of of various proteins and nutrients, produced by the mother that laid the egg, and a calcium carbonate shell, also made entirely by the mother. This egg, created entirely by the mother and not by the union of an ovum and sperm cell and any mutations that happened then, belongs entirely to the mother.
If Proto-chicken mother has laid clutch after clutch of eggs, all those are proto-chicken eggs. When one of those clutches happens to have a mutant that we arbitrarily declare is a "chicken," the egg itself has not changed in any way, only the DNA of the organism housed in the egg.
So, on thinking about it, I want to go back and change my answer.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg
Subjectively, I feel that the soft-G is milquetoast mild to the degree that it's unpleasant to say or hear. Insipid like a cold bland porridge. Hard-G has all the zest, all the pizazz!
Though it does seem to be an American thing - we pronounce the H in pretty much all words too, whereas Americans tend to make a lot of "H" sounds silent.
And a peanut butter in the US. So what?
> Saying "Gif" as "jif" seems very redundant - why even have different letters?
English is...rather unconcerned with having an absence of duplication of sounds between letters (“c” and “x” are pretty much completely redundant with other letters, and there are plenty of overlaps on the other letters in represented sounds.)
To the extent this is true, it's only in a sense where consensus is much more than mere majority preference and it's absence, and thus the absence of a single correct pronunciation, is also possible and, in fact, common; for GIF, there is an absence of consensus on pronunciation, and thus a diversity of pronunciations with shifting popularity. Your preference may be the eventual consensus, but English can maintain words with multiple pronunciations with shifting popularity over a very long term without settling to general consensus, so maybe not.
People can call it whichever they want. If you say gif or jif and someone else corrects you then they're just being dumb. Clearly they understood what you meant and until consensus is almost unanimous (around 90-99%) both pronunciations are fine. I also don't think the creator's pronunciation matters. If they originally said it should be pronounced jife but people were between jif and gif then saying either jif and gif would make sense in conversation but jife wouldn't.
I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G
Oh? Why do you say that? I mean, I doubt knowing what the creator said has that big of an impact but maybe I'm wrong on that.
> I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G
Show me a poll that doesn't tell you the answer in the options. When one of the answers is "gif", and it wins as the pronunciation for "gif", that's a useless result.
Are you gonna argue that there exists a significant number of people that would pronounce it jif with no prompting? That's quite a stretch
When you say 'no prompting', you mean just finding it in text with no context? Hell if I know whether people blindly guess it's like "give" or "gin" but neither one seems super obvious over the other unless you treat it like it's derived from the word "gift".
If you say it in front of someone and they possibly correct you, I don't know why the techy version would differ from the average person version.
I personally don't know anyone who'd pronounce it with a j sound and I severely doubt anyone in my country would default to a j sound, but I'm open to that being cultural. I just think the fact that hard G wins by such a landslide is pretty good evidence that defaulting to a j sound is incredibly rare
A 20/80 split in a poll in a world in which lots of people are correcting others towards a hard G indicates that there's plenty of people choosing to pronounce it like "gin" or "gist" or "gelatin" or "genius" or "generous" or "genetic" or "giant" or "gymnast" or "ginger" or ...
Because, even if this were a valid (random sample of the target population) survey, 1 in 5 is a lot, especially given the fact that the distribution of pronunciation is not homogeneous geographically or by other divides that define distinct subgroups of language use.
> I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s a strong consensus it’s a hard G
I think the existence of ongoing debate among speakers of the language as to the correct pronunciation is strong evidence that there is no consensus.
Would it also "make sense" to pronounce jpeg "jay-feg"? Or "nasa" "neh-sa"? Or "laser" "lah-ssur"?
If you watch Back to the Future (which came out in 1985), Dr Brown pronounces gigawatts as jigawatts, and now the common pronunciation has a hard G. It has the same initial gi-, so I guess sometime in the 1990's the trend was to prefer hard G over soft G in technical words which start with gi-.
The original pronunciation is with a hard g, though there was a brief period after the US National Bureau of Standards claimed otherwise where some people in America thought otherwise. At least according to [0].
[0] https://www.quora.com/Was-the-prefix-giga-originally-pronoun...
Roughly every 10th person pronouncing it with a soft G doesn't sound like an "anomaly" of a single movie to me (as claimed in the quora post), more like a less common variant.
>It's not a well-researched documentary.
Of course, it's not. But it gives us audio evidence that some people in the 1980's pronounced it with a soft G (or thought it's pronounced with a soft G because they wouldn't usually use -- and hear -- the word IRL, just like with GIF's)
A whole 51% the internet currently appears to agree. Phew.
> If you define a chicken egg as an egg that was laid by a chicken
Species are assumed to produce eggs of the same species. Like many convenient turns of phrase, this isn't strictly true. What the egg contains (unless the egg casing is a relevant attribute) is how it is characterized.
A mutation exists in the developing embryo, so a non-chicken had a chicken-containing egg. This is a chicken egg, which necessarily came first. Looking at any given xenopregnancy (a hybrid Liger, or panda fetus in a cat, et al). The carrying species does not make the result of that species. eg If there was a non-chicken species (say, a turkey) which produced eggs that were genetically and practically identical to chicken-containing eggs, they would be called chicken eggs.
Viewed this way, what actually caused chickens to happen was the migration, not the genetics. It was the part where the two red junglefowl groups came out of genetic contact and started to diverge. On the assumption that these red junglefowl were adults (which is obvious if it was a migration, but merely likely if it was forced by humans), this means that a population of non-chickens was divided into two subpopulations, one of which was chickens, one of which wasn't.
So even agreeing that we should categorize the egg by the creature it produced immediately after hatching, you still get by this argument that a nonchicken egg hatched into a nonchicken which by circumstance became a chicken... Chickens came first, and then their chicken eggs.
Which egg?
Obviously "the egg that the chicken hatched from" came first, no one's debating that. But that's all you've said.
If the question is "which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg", then it depends on whether the chicken egg is one that houses the chicken, or the one that is laid by a chicken.
Would you really argue that those eggs hatching into mules are not mule eggs?
I could see an argument that those eggs, coming out of canaries, could count as canary eggs, but not in a way that stops them from being mule eggs. "mule eggs" definitely needs to include the eggs that hatch into mules.
You could still debate if a non-chicken egg with chicken DNA is a chicken egg. Its shell and yolk, all contents, were produced by a non-chicken - imagine the eggshell was blue, not white, and the final allele change to become “chicken” switched the “egg color laid once grown” to white.
If all this eggs contents were produced by a genetically non-chicken - the egg is blue - is it really a “chicken egg”?
Imagine you took a chicken egg, and modified the DNA so that an elephant would hatch. Is this a “chicken egg (with elephant DNA)” or an “elephant egg (with shell, white, and yolk produced by a chicken)”?
Viewed your way, a chicken actually gave birth to a nonchicken who gave birth to a nonchicken who gave birth to a chicken who gave birth to a nonchicken who gave birth to a chicken that was finally the mother of an unbroken line of hens that survives to this day, some of whom had nonchicken fathers.
The problem is that the variation of the breeding population is much larger than the distance from the originals to the final result.
Those mutations happen at/inside the egg. At some point… little by little, two animals have an offspring that isn’t exactly like them.
The chicken egg came before the chicken that laid it. Some other animal laid it. And likewise the egg existed before the chicken inside it developed.
In no scenario that I can steelman does the chicken ever come first.
Another way to put it is that a chicken was once an egg, so even if "the chicken came first," that chicken was once an egg.
A chicken was once a fertilized egg cell, but an "egg" is the vessel that contains the zygote [1], and was created entirely by the mother (i.e. it is not a result of fertilization). So a chicken was once in an egg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg
Consider the context before trying to correct people. You’re just being pedantic for no reason.
Many people in this thread are using the word "egg" in the same way as a female mammal releases an "egg" in estrus, i.e. the cell which will become an organism once fertilized. Hence the discussion elsewhere of how the mutation has already happened in this cell.
For instance, besides this thread, another person said "resulting in the very first chicken ever. Which of course started out as an egg.
I'm saying that a bird "egg", from the Wikipedia link, is not the gamete cell but rather simply the container, created by the mother.
So statements such as "[the chicken] started out as an egg" or "a chicken was once an egg" (your statement) are simply incorrect, just as saying "a human baby was once a uterus" is wrong.
It's not pedantic "for no reason" (at least any more than the rest of this by-definition pedantic discussion is).
And that's the best I can do. But it's silly, because that interpretation of the question has an extremely obvious answer, which implies that this is _not_ the intended meaning of the question -- if the structure of the question contains the required answer, then you wouldn't bother asking that question at all.
So we're right back at of course the bloody egg came first.
Anyone else want to take a shot?
To expand to dinosaurs, chickens, and Bronteroc's.
Assuming there's just chickens, and we're talking just about chicken eggs, then the chicken came first. Chickens need a mother to hatch the egg, to create the egg in it's womb, etc. An egg cannot exist without a mother to birth it.
I'm assuming that evolution would happen slowly over time, the creature that ended up becoming the chicken would have had to already been laying eggs. The egg laying feature would need to already be present for it to be our modern day preciously defined chicken.
The egg had to have come first
I don't think the question is about a fantasy world that only has chickens, and the chickens came from ????.
Just treat it as "chicken" vs. "chicken egg".
Is your answer the same if the question is about a person instead of straw?
Both possible answers are technically correct, because "hole" has at least two relevant definitions: (1) a hollow space inside something, (2) an aperture connecting two spaces. A straw has one #1 type hole, and two #2 type holes.
#2 is probably more practically correct, because most of the time when one wants to talk about a straw's holes, it will be the apertures that one wants to talk about not the hollow interior.
A food can be classified by which faces of a cube the outer layer of carbs populate. In the case of a hot dog, it is a taco, since the bottom and two sides are the carb structure.
https://cuberule.com/
A slice of any of them is a toast.
No inconsistency there.
Though I prefer "pizza" to "toast".
In the context hotdogs appear, it is around other bread meat combinations:
hotdog hamburger sandwich
these are distinct things, and to some they are assumeable identities where one can expect criticism for any choice, despite their overlapping feature sets
as such, hotdog is not a sandwich
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sandwich
1a: two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between
1b: one slice of bread covered with food
By the anti-sandwich lobby's logic, if you were to build a ham and cheese sandwich using one piece of bread and then folded it in the middle to make it look and function like a "traditional" double breaded sandwich, it would somehow magically no longer qualify as a sandwich -- and that's just plain absurd.
(Yes I think a tortilla is a valid bread for this.)
> By the anti-sandwich lobby's logic, if you were to build a ham and cheese sandwich using one piece of bread and then folded it in the middle to make it look and function like a "traditional" double breaded sandwich, it would somehow magically no longer qualify as a sandwich -- and that's just plain absurd.
I don't think it requires magic to say that a sub sandwich is not a true sandwich.
Also those people wouldn't say you had a sandwich to start with. It's reasonable to say that open-faced sandwiches aren't true sandwiches, and I think people would agree that the folded version is either equally or more sandwichy than an open-face.
The question is where the exact threshold lies. Are both sandwiches? Just the folded one? Neither?
Don't get too hung up on the dictionary definition you quoted. Dictionaries are over-inclusive and include very casual language. Spiders are not actually bugs, even though people sometimes use the word that way and you can find it in a dictionary.
It requires the most absurd magic to say that a sub is not a sandwich. It's literally everything that you call a sandwich without any differences whatsoever. It's only nicknamed a "sub" because the shape of the bread resembles a submarine. That's it. Your completely arbitrary limitation of a sandwich being two square-shaped pieces of bread simply doesn't reflect reality.
> Dictionaries are over-inclusive and include very casual language.
The irony is rich, given that you're trying to redefine words to have completely different meanings than the original.
First: When I said the dictionary was over-inclusive, I was implying that your 1b might be wrong. The definition that includes "open faced sandwiches". It's not clear whether those should count. Yes, even though "sandwich" is in the name. Like how a veggie hamburger isn't actually a hamburger. They are an alternate version of a sandwich, on par with a pizza.
Second: I wasn't clear about subs. I thought context would help, but I guess not enough. So, trying again. If you take a loaf and cut it in two, and put stuff in between, everyone will agree that's a sandwich. It's not about the kind of bread or anything. Where some people disagree is when you don't cut the loaf all the way, when you no longer have "pieces of bread" at all.
> The irony is rich
But do you disagree with what I said there about bugs?
Also you didn't answer about tacos. That's not a gotcha, I want to understand how you draw the line and how you interpret the dictionary definition. I don't want to put words in your mouth or guess, and it looks really stupid whenever I make a choose-your-own-adventure argument.
Hot dogs are tacos, not sandwiches, per the cube rule. [0]
[0] https://cuberule.com/
Arguing the boundaries of arbitrary semantic categories with no significance isn't something “logic or reason” plays a whole lot of role in in any case [0]; what is on display is a whole lot of emotional attachment backed with a abusive language, not “logic and reason”.
[0] Which is, of course, what the site is satirizing.
All of the cube rule starch configurations can be distinguished independently of orientation.
12:59 https://youtu.be/egEraZP9yXQ?t=779
15:59 https://youtu.be/egEraZP9yXQ?t=959
- GIF /dʒɪf/: Graphics Interchange Format
- gif /ɡɪf/: short looping silent video
Uh, literally anyone who works with graphics?
I get that people want to be lazy but pronouncing acronyms/contractions has always been fraught with disagreement. Same goes for things like SQL (which somehow gets pronounced as "sequel") while people leave PDF alone.
Sounds like you meant it was originally "Structured English QUEry Language"?
Not the most inspiring way to form an acronym.
The fact that GIF videos are considered an image is really just a quirk of evolution of the image format to support videos and browsers supporting these videos in an <img> tag (and nowhere else).
Edit: I think a lot of people thought I was serious. Just joking around.
We never discus image formats tho. I’ll have to ask them about GIF next time.
Don't get me started on Stuyvesant! ;-)
/s in case it's not obvious
You wouldn't think "the breathing apparatus of a fish" before "the unit of measure"? When was the last time you saw something measured in gills?
https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
so "ghoti" can be pronounced the same as "fish"
When I was young I never understood the French idea of 'the death of the author'. I found the idea of ignoring the author's intentions in writing a novel, and of ignoring their clarifications regarding the novel, quite absurd. In time, I have found myself more on the side of this idea.
An author can create something, but this does not give them dictates over how it is interpreted by the rest of us. Creation need not imply authority over understanding, nor later insights inspired from a work.
I'm not sure the pronunciation of an acronym for an image format quite fits into the concept of literary criticism, but I can't say that I'll ever be too bothered that the original author has had the misfortune of pronouncing their own format incorrectly.
[1]: https://www.thoughtco.com/chaos-by-charivarius-gerard-nolst-...
Imagine if someone said “well actually the inventor of the paper clip pronounces it with a soft ‘c’ so it sounds like ‘paper slip’”
This seems so clearly absurd that I don’t even really know how to argue against it.
The problem is people aren't going to look up the "correct" pronunciation. They're just going to say it how ever it seems like it would be said by reading it in their native language. Once enough people do it it's too late to fix.
An interesting related thing is how people pronounce initials. For example NOP ("No" "Awp" or "Nawp" or "Nope" I had a colleague that pronounced RTS as "ritz". What I find interesting with "ritz" is why the "i". Why not "rats" or "ruts" or "rets" or "rots".
In my domain, graphics, there's GLSL which some people say "Glisle" and "WGSL" which some call "Wigsle". But why not "Glasle" or "Glashal" and "Wagsle"/"Washal". Why did they choose "i". "a" makes more sense given that the letters stand for and if you're going to abandon what the letters stand for, still, why "i" and not some other vowel?
This has an explanation! If a short vowel is inserted as a transition between two consonants, there is a strong tendency for the inserted sound to be a more ‘neutral’ vowel, such as the schwa /ə/. But in many English dialects, there has been a merger [0] between the schwa /ə/ and the short ‘i’ sound /ɪ/ — the two sounds are no longer distinguishable by native speakers of those dialects. Thus, what might be pronounced as [ɹəts] sounds very much like ‘ritz’, and ‘GLSL’ becomes [ɡləzl̩], sounding like ‘Glisle’.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis...
I don't say this out of disrespect; language is a sort of chaotic dynamic group-level system, and what happens initially is only one small input.
Is this true? Basically a lot of people in europe will jump to soft g. Will latin america pronounce "gi" as the aspirated H?. Don't know anything about the countries in africa, I hear nigeria is pretty big and there's a lot of tech coming out of there. India (big elephant, pun intended) I suppose is hard g, but what about china -- I have no clue? Japan (120M, almost half the population of US, mind you) is exclusively soft g -- likely because hard g collides with the name of a prefecture (province). Korea I think is hard g (50 m, almost all very tech-savvy). Indonesia?
OK, I'm pronouncing GIF as 'throatwobbler mangrove', then.
Here's a wonderful video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmqy-Sp0txY
Graphics Interchange Format
Try to say Graphics with a soft G.
That's not exactly difficult to do, though it would be spelled "draphics".
It's difficult to see what this is supposed to be relevant to; acronyms are never given pronunciations taken from their hidden constituent words. Try to say "stimulated" with a /z/ (as in "LASER").
Yup, and there are plenty of others too:
SCUBA - U as in uh-nderwater
SIM / VIN - I as in I-dentification
YOLO - second O as in wuh-nce
CAPTCHA - first A as in aw-tomated
AWOL - soft a-bsent
ICE - ih-mmigration and Customs Enforcement
NATO - soft A-tlantic
OCONUS - ow-tside
OSHA - ah-ccupational
SCOTUS / POTUS - uh-f
AIDS - a-cquired
It's really a long list if you look. I vote for GIF with a J sound.
Here's a soft G word making a hard G acronym, and a hard G word making a soft G acronyn:
Some other non-G examples: They're much harder to find though.But we can all have preferences, and in some small way be part of the process of pushing English in one direction or another. So here's my pitch for the hard g:
Ambiguous letters are very annoying. I'm teaching my kids to read and it's very frustrating. C is sometimes like sometimes like k (except when k is followed by n) and sometimes like s (except when s is followed by h), unless c is followed by h in which case...you get the idea. We have more sounds than letters, so some ambiguity is required by a sort of pigeonhole principle. It's weird, then, that we have multiple letters for the same sound. A misuse of resources.
But at least C the rules are relatively clean. G is the worst of them, because you really can't tell. Gimble but giant, etc.
So we ought to try to minimize the degree to which this happens because it makes English more approachable for everyone. If you coin a word starting with a "k" sound, start it with a k. And if you want something to start with "j" use a j. (If you want a hard g, you have to use a g, so that's settled already). Then, on the margins, English is slightly more consistent.
With words where there's no consensus, you probably can't change the spelling (and with gif you surely can't) but the same logic applies: pick in the direction of less ambiguity. Since we already have a "j" sound, we should, where possible, make "g" hard.
So say gif with a hard g for humanity.
- accessibility[0]
- customization - not everyone wants the same tab-width
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/c8drjo/nobody_t...
tabs don't work for customization
If there are tabs between the code and the comments they won't align if you customize their length. If you use spaces there then you're just hypocritical.There are just as many arguments pro tabs as there are con tabs
Many could be solved with smart tools. Have your editor reformat the text to your preference. Have it put it back to the project's preference when you check it in.
Tabs are not suited to aligning code, but ideal for indentation.
I think you might be misunderstanding the alignment comment. The idea is that the lines starting with "function" and "arg4" have the same number of tabs, and then the "arg4" line has nine spaces after the tabs.
(For a better readability and ease of edition, I however prefer to actually indent arguments (each on it's line) rather than the suggested alignment, as I show in the second function)
Fortunately all the projects I work on do the proper thing and use spaces ;)
React (FB) says they use spaces: https://github.com/airbnb/javascript#whitespace (react links to the airbnb style guide)
Google: is usually spaces, https://google.github.io/styleguide/jsguide.html#formatting-...
Apple: https://llvm.org/docs/CodingStandards.html#whitespace, https://webkit.org/code-style-guidelines/#indentation-4-spac..., Swift (load xcode, see it inserts spaces in default code projects and with reformatting in xcode, ...)
Mozilla: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/code-quality/coding-..., rustfmt defaults to spaces: https://rust-lang.github.io/rustfmt/?version=v1.4.38&search=...
Python: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#tabs-or-spaces
PS: I know some projects use tabs (go, linux) for example. I don't work on those :P
Of all the ways you could object, I feel like listing makefiles and python might make the least sense. Makefiles require tabs and python has zero problems using tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment. In fact, python will make it harder to accidentally indent a line wrong than almost any other language.
I'd just say people are more likely to screw up, or something like that.
> PS: I know some projects use tabs (go, linux) for example. I don't work on those :P
Linux requires 8 space indentations so it's the worst of all worlds.
As long as you never use tabs after other characters, things will work well enough.
Use tabs for logical indentation and spaces for line wrapping indentation! (/s)
Sure, fine. I kind of like 3, to be honest. But have you had to deal with 8? My code's already inside a function inside a class. I don't want super wide columns, and I don't want >30 spaces of indentation when I go only two layers deep inside that function.
Further back much of my code was inside a function inside a class inside a namespace...
And code formatters are not usually very good at letting you edit in a different form from the canonical repo format.
I mean, 'politely' see them off please.