A peanut butter brand has put its spoon into the GIF pronunciation debate

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Last week, an email popped into my mailbox with a simple subject: "Jif vs. GIF." Its sender asked if I was interested in hearing about a peanut butter producer's interest in "setting the record straight on how to pronounce GIF."

That's not quite what I got. The powers that be at Smucker's advertising department thought we at Ars Technica might bite on their proposal that a new jar of Jif would put the years-long pronunciation debate to rest. Instead, I ended up spending too much time talking about, contemplating, and researching the pronunciation of the letter G-and of other invented brands and acronyms in general.

Does Wilhite have it right?

If you're wondering, the J.M. Smucker Company-known on the street as Smucker's-comes down on the "hard-G" side of this debate. The company does this in order to support its latest advertising campaign that says-wouldn't you know it-the soft-G version has already existed for decades in the form of a massive peanut butter brand. Thus, the people at Smucker's say, don't mix up the two. Soft G "jiff" for food; hard G "giff" for an animated image format that came into vogue during GeoCities' heyday.

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