Today I learned I have been pronouncing “gift” wrong my entire life and I should have been conforming to the “g” in “gif” or in “ginger”.

Gee, I know some gigantic, gentle, geriatric giraffes who would take umbridge with that pronunciation.

Because everybody knows GIF means Giraffe Interchange Format!

It was invented by rangers in the Serengeti for keeping track of Giraffes changing between areas. They made graphics illustrating those movements, and the format they used became knows as GIF. That's the secret history of the image format.

The P in JPEG stands for "photographic". Do you pronounce it "jay-feg"?

The situation is different. The first letter in "photo" is not the "p" but the "ph". They are one. The "h" is a modifier. In "graphics" there is no modifier on the "g".

TL;DR H as modifier was introduced when translating Greek and they were lacking appropriate letters in Latin.

https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/29625/origin...

https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-88... -- last answer by Anastasio de la Luna (and a few other answers there too)

> I'm a phoneticist and a general linguist and "PH" and "F" are, indeed, pronounced the same, and are both represented by /f/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Greek Phi was once pronounced as a hard "P" in Ancient Greek. So, Latin inscriptions wrote it as "PH" to show that it's a P sound, but with more air with H. As Greek changed, so did the Greek based English words. In Modern Greek, Phi is pronounced as "F", and no longer like "PH"/a hard P.

..and I forgot: That means that it should have been J-Ph-EG and not JPEG. They created a completely different first letter by ignoring that "ph" is one letter. The J-PEG pronunciation was obtained by using destructive force.

"What if F Scott Fitzgerald came up to earth, said "It's pronounced Jatsby", then left?"

> "What if F Scott Fitzgerald came up to earth, said "It's pronounced Jatsby", then left?"

Oh what you don't know!

Robert Louis Stevensons 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', the pronunciation of Jekyll should be "Jyeec-ill" (rhymes with 'treacle') and not "Jek-ill".

Stevenson was of course Scottish, and this is how the Scots name is pronounced. However, the latter pronunciation for the books title has come into more common use for some reason.

.....I so badly don't want this to be true, but in my heart I think I know it is!

Yikes! The gig is up,after all that overwhelming evidence.

Does this mean that 'char' is also pronounced 'care'?

When it’s short for character, sure.

Are you being serious? I only knew one person who did this in real life, and even they said it almost like 'car'.

Totally serious. I think this pronunciation varies with accent.

Or “charisma”!

I had a professor who pronounced char as in “char-broiled”. At least it rhymed when she constantly repeated “char star”, referring to char pointers (char*).

That's how I learned it using C in the 80s. Maybe Millennials are redefining it too.

This is how most programmers in the UK refer to it too.