Discuss guns and politics all you want on the internet. But speak not of how to pronounce file types

THE Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is the brainchild of Steve Wilhite. He invented it in 1987 while working at CompuServe, a time-sharing system that originated before the internet, and was open to anyone with a dial-up modem. In those days, when transfer rates topped out at 2,400 bits per second, less than a thousandth of what modern DSL or cable connections can manage, minimising the number of bits dispatched was vitally important. GIF reduced the colour palette and compressed data to achieve just such savings. GIF also dominated JPEG, a rival format best suited for photographs, in the web's early days because of its compactness. That much everyone agrees on.

Much more controversial is how "GIF" ought to be pronounced. In acronyms beginning with a consonant that can be hard or soft, the leading word of the expanded version tends to determine the sound. According to this rule, the "g" in GIF is like the one in "git", not "gin".

Would that it were so simple. Mr Wilhite regularly corrected colleagues who dared utter the hard "g". One of his chastened co-workers e-mailed Babbage back in 1997 explaining how Mr Wilhite would remonstrate by belting out "Choosy programmers choose GIF" (a play on a classic advertising slogan, "choosy mothers choose Jif", for a homophonous peanut-butter brand). Though Mr Wilhite has been off the radar since the early 1990s, CompuServe perpetuated his rendition.

The whole pronunciation palaver erupted in full force after Twitter released its Vine app, which lets people tweet six-second videos. These are encoded in the mp4 format, but the launch reminded many internet users about "animated GIFs", which Mr Wilhite and colleagues developed as an update to GIF in 1989, and which allowed users to post Vine-like, if more staccato, clips. (Animated GIFs remain popular on social-media sites, and several iOS apps allows their creation, too.)

Predictably, the discussion spilled onto Twitter. It began with an innocent question by Kai Ryssdal, host of the public-radio programme "Marketplace", who asked, "GIF: soft 'g' or hard?" Farhad Manjoo, a columnist at Slate, replied authoritatively, "Soft". He later adduced evidence painstakingly collected by Steve Olsen, who maintains a hoary but exhaustive FAQ page devoted to GIF pronunciation. Mr Olson is categorical: "It's pronounced like 'jif'. Period. The end. That's final. End of story."

The main question seems to be whether an acronym's coiner has the right to determine its pronunciation. Most of the time, speakers are happy to defer to inventors. The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format, designed to avoid patent and other disputes in the 1990s, stipulates in its specification document that its phonetic form is "ping". Members of the Joint Photographic Experts Group, which spawned JPEG, have always insisted it be pronounced "jay-peg". No one minds.

Except that JPEG is not the format's proper name. In fact, the acronym refers to the compression algorithm, not the encapsulating file type, which is correctly known as JPEG Interchange Format. Or JIF.