Jif peanut butter is trying to get some of their own “MR. PEANUT IS DEAD!” viral fame by pairing up with GIPHY to release limited edition peanut butter jars that promise to “settle the great debate” on how to pronounce Gif/Jif. OK, sure. The new Gif jars are being sold for ten bucks on Amazon, and it looks they’re already sold out because dummies love buying dumb shit.
Jif’s daddy company, J.M. Smucker Company, released this statement through CNN:
Although Jif is obviously pronounced with a “soft G,” people often mispronounce the word “GIF,” which is short for Graphics Interchange Format. It’s said with a “soft G like the peanut butter and not a “hard G.” That’s according to creator Steve Wilhite, who made the declaration in 2013 while accepting a Webby Award.
Regardless of the official ruling, the internet has remained divided. Jif is partnering with GIPHY, a GIF search engine, to “put a lid on this decade-long debate”: Both GIF and the peanut butter are pronounced “Jif.”
I had to read that statement three times to make any sense of it. And I took English all the way to high school! Google (which I now know has two hard Gs) tells me that a hard G is like “Gossip”, and a soft G is like “Giraffe”. So, basically, the soft G is a J sound. And both Gif and Jif are said with soft Gs. Why, I think I’ve got it! By (Soft G) George, I’ve got it!
But honestly, what’s the point of learning all of this when it’s just gonna be pushed out by more episodes of Love is Blind later today? There’s only so many things my tiny peanut (butter) brain can hold all at once! But I will say this for my mind holes, it turns out I’ve been pronouncing “gif” correctly this whole time. Or wait, maybe I was actually on the hard G side?