Team Soft G

Apparently, at least on Twitter, today is the day for all parties to declare their allegiance on the matter of the pronunciation of “GIF,” the Graphics Interchange Format.

I stand with the soft G. (The “JIF” pronunciation, if you must.)

My reasons, like my wallet, are bifold:

1. The creator of the format, Steve Wilhite, said that it is pronounced with a soft G, and this pronunciation was endorsed by his employer, CompuServe. The peanut-butter-like pronunciation was intentional. In my opinion, it is reasonable to grant inventors the privilege of naming their inventions, including their pronunciation*.  This privilege makes at least as much sense as patent protection.
2. The usual hard-G argument is that “Graphics” is pronounced with a hard G, so GIF should be as well. This is a stupid argument, based on a non-existent, made-up rule that is not invoked for any other acronym. Anyone who advances this argument deserves to lose**.

* Within reason, at least.
** Anyone who pronounces “SCUBA” with a short U, “UNICEF” with a CH , “LASER” with a short A and soft S (not Z), and “NASCAR” with a schwa for the first A is exempt from argument #2.

This would be a good time to get “fiancée/fiancé” right.

Skin cancer, possession by demons, whatever.

MSNBC, on hair stylists noticing signs of skin cancer:

Most people make 10 visits or more a year to see their hair dressers and barbers and they tend to look more carefully for mold and legions on the scalp.

Emphasis mine.

Mangled metaphor of the day

David Vladek of the FTC:

If you don't come up with that novel use for that data, it's an albatross that will come back and bite you.

Gmail’s contact manager is not helping my delusions of godhood.

So sharp, it’s blury!

A marketing email from GearXS advertises this Blu-ray player:

Protip: “Blu-ray” is only missing one letter, not two.

Roads: Windber has too many

Windber has an "Excess Road" to Route 56:

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Word of the day: Vomitory

Penn State Live details some improvements at Beaver Stadium:

Penn State fans will see several significant upgrades at Beaver Stadium that have taken place during the off-season when they attend the season-opener against Indiana State on Sept. 3 (noon kick).

The most significant changes to the venerable facility include:

…

- Improved drainage in seating areas

…

Also in the East and West stands, vomitory ramps have been improved to allow for increased and easier access by ADA patrons to the new seating areas.
Fans will also notice significant changes on the North side of the stadium. The Section NF vomitory ramp has been modified with a gentler slope to permit ADA spectators to enter the North field level seats from Section NF, rather than the visiting team tunnel.

Now, I know that a lot of people drink too much at the games, and that has consequences. At last year’s Michigan State game, the guy next to me was removed because we were afraid he’d lose his lunch on our shoes.

But it never occurred to me that the stadium required special drainage channels for vomit.

It turns out that vomitory has a specialized meaning in stadium architecture.

Euphemism for “corruption” of the day

The Consumerist, on a proposed tunnel between Alaska and Russia:

Russia's complex business and political interests, though, could stop the venture in its tracks.

Sentence of the day: This prose makes me temporally mental

Ars Technica on Xeon vs. Itanium:

Let's take the last one first, since it came first temporally.

This comes after the part where the author compares an annual revenue figure to a quarterly revenue figure, then just gives up, and stops bothering to even say whether figures are annual or quarterly or product-lifetime or fortnightly.

Seriously, amigos?

Natasha Lennard, writing in Salon about some stupid Bristol Palin controversy:

Such a furor has grown around Bristol Palin's jawline in recent days, the issue even earned itself the standard suffix of scandal: "Chingate."

Urban Dictionary: chingate

Weird usage of the day

The Wall Street Journal on iOS vs. Android:

The study also found that although iPad owners are more than Apple “fanboys,” they’re less likely to own BlackBerry or Android phones. Among iPad owners, 27.3% also have iPhones, while 17.5% have BlackBerry devices and 14.2% have Android phones. (The rest use other operating systems or have flip phones rather than smartphones.)

"Flip phone" to mean non-smartphone is a new one for me. (Says the guy who has a non-flip dumbphone.)

F’in Low Dispersion

This is why you pick up a thesaurus instead of letting your engineers name the technology:

FLD ("F" Low Dispersion) glass is the highest level low dispersion glass available with extremely high light transmission. This glass has a performance equal to flourite [sic] glass which has a low refractive index and low dispersion compared to current optical glass. FLD glass offers superior optical performance, equal to flourite, at an affordable price.

ELD (Extraordinary Low Dispersion) glass has lower dispersion characteristics than SLD (Special Low Dispersion) glass, which Sigma has been using in its APO lenses (and some non-APO lenses as well) for many years now. It has other advantageous properties as well.

See also: Chateau Potelle VGS wines. They're very good.

Obsessive possessive

Many businesses are named after their proprietors, using a possessive: Larry’s Auto Body, Audi’s Olde World Restaurant, Krisay’s Appliance and Bedding. Others, however, are not.

Growing up, my parents and I would fuel the car at Sheetz, and note with amusement that one of my uncles would instead go to “Sheetz’s.” But at least Sheetz is the name of the chain’s founder, so even if the sign says “Sheetz,” it is indeed Sheetz’s chain. So, okay, I guess. It still sounds better than Wawa.

The local Mexican restaurant, Rey Azteca (“Aztec King”) is a popular lunch spot for the guys at work. When I first started, they kept talking about “Rey’s.” I was briefly convinced that Original Famous Ray’s Famous Original Pizza had opened in Johnstown.

Since I reviewed a new restaurant, Ambrosia Fine Dining, one of the top search queries bringing visitors to my blog is [ambrosias johnstown pa]. (I have to assume it’s meant as a possessive, since pluralizing ambrosia makes even less sense.)

Is this insistence on possessivizing business names a local phenomenon, or more widespread? I don’t recall it happening when I lived in California.

Colons: The vestigal appendix of the title? (or: Paragraph-and-a-sentence of the day, title selection edition)

Jeff Ely, writing in Cheap Talk:

The absolute worst thing you can do with your title is to insert a colon into it. (quiet down beavis!) As in, Torture: A Model of Dynamic Commitment Problems. Or Kludged: Asymptotically Inefficient Evolution. In the first case you have just ruined a seminal-signaling one-word title by adding spurious specificity. In the second, you just took an intriguing one-world title and turned it into a yawner.

The second worst kind of title is the question mark title.

Word of the Day: Apodizing

Via PC Gaming Tips, “An apodizing phase plate coronagraph for VLT/NACO”:

Abstract: We describe a coronagraphic optic for use with CONICA at the VLT that provides suppression of diffraction from 1.8 to 7 lambda/D at 4.05 microns, an optimal wavelength for direct imaging of cool extrasolar planets. The optic is designed to provide 10 magnitudes of contrast at 0.2 arcseconds, over a D-shaped region in the image plane, without the need for any focal plane occulting mask.

Apodizing, of course, means “if you take cool extrasolar planet pictures with our coronagraph, they’re sure to end up on APOD.”

Word of the Day: Wurstmeister

From an excellent New York Times article titled “If Only Laws Were Like Sausages”:

“With legislation, you can have hundreds of cooks — members of Congress, lobbyists, federal agency officials, state officials,” Mr. Feder said. “In sausage making, you generally have one person, the wurstmeister, who runs the business and makes the decisions.”

Things the Germans probably have a word for, Volume 1

The feeling that you have squandered a dream, because you didn't realize it was a dream, and you behaved as morally as you would in real life.

Zeugmax

Arnold Zwicky quotes a classic example of zeugma:

… he hastened to put out the cat, the wine, his cigar, and the lamps.

I note, however, that put out, without an object, has its own idiomatic meaning. I therefore propose a new construction, Extreme Zeugma^TM:

I want to date a girl who puts out the wine, the lamps, and .

Anal about quality

Language Log’s Arnold Zwicky, writing in his personal blog:

A final linguistic note, with a story about my colleague Paul Kiparsky, who long ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts, confronted an American supermarket while on a search for toilet paper. One after another, he inspected the choices, noting that they claimed to be “facial quality tissue”, eventually complaining forcefully, “I don’t want facial quality tissue, I want RECTAL quality tissue”. (You have to imagine the Finnish accent.)