Jif and Giphy Fuel GIF Pronunciation Battle With Peanut Butter Labels

Brendan Menapace

How do you pronounce a little moving picture on the computer? Do you say “gif” with a hard “g,” or “jif” with the soft “g?”

If we’re getting technical, the hard “g” is objectively correct, because GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. So, you’d pronounce the “g” the same way as you would for “graphic.” But, in an incredibly confusing and frustrating turn of events, creator of the GIF Steve Wilhite says that it should be pronounced like “jif.”

There are people out there who are hardcore about their soft “g.” They’re wrong, but they’re out there.

Because of that, the J.M. Smucker Company, creator of the homophonous peanut butter company Jif, teamed up with GIF website Giphy to create fun peanut butter labels differentiating the two.

Honestly, we’re surprised it took both parties this long to think of this. This seems like something that they would have pounced on the minute this argument became a Thing Online.

But, here we are, buying “Gif” branded Jif peanut butter on Amazon for $10.

While Jif is the only one of the two companies that makes physical products, Giphy has done a good amount of marketing heavy-lifting by creating a collection of Gif versus Jif GIFS on the site.

Here’s a whole bunch of them:

via GIPHY

via GIPHY

via GIPHY

via GIPHY

Trust us when we say there’s plenty more where that came from.

The battle will rage on, and Jif and Giphy’s irresponsible bothsidesism via releasing two labels is only going to fuel the fire.

But maybe that’s what they want. They want us to fight amongst ourselves without giving us a clear answer, even though they both know. They know, they just don’t want us to know. Because if we know, we have the power. And if we have the power, we won’t buy two jars of peanut butter. Wake up, people!

It’s irresponsible and dangerous, but it is dang good marketing. Respect.

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