As the holiday season is upon us and a Hackaday scribe sits protected from the incoming Atlantic storms in her snug eyrie, it’s time for her to consider the basics of her craft. Writing, spelling, and the English language; such matters as why Americans have different English spellings from Brits, but perhaps most important of them all for Hackaday readers; is it “gif”, or is is “jif”? This or the jokey sentence about spellings might be considered obvious clickbait, but instead they’re a handle to descend into the study of language. Just how do we decide the conventions of our language, and should we even care too much about them?

Don’t Believe Everything You Read in School

We are sent to school to Learn Stuff. During that time we are deprived of our liberty as a succession of adults attempt year after year to cram our heads with facts. Some of it we find interesting and other parts not so much, but for the majority of it, we are discouraged from thinking for ourselves and are instead expected to learn by rote a set of fixed curricula.

Thus while writers have to discover for themselves that English is a constantly evolving language through which they can break free of these artificial bounds that school has imposed upon them, far too many people remain afraid to put their head above the linguistic parapet.

The result is that perceived deviations from the rules are jumped upon by those afraid to move with the language, and we even find our own linguistic Holy Wars to fight. The one mentioned above about “gif” versus “jif” is a great example, does it really matter that much whether you pronounce it with a hard “G” because that’s how most people say it, or as though it were a “J” because the creator of the file format said it that way? Not really, because English is an evolving language in the hands of those who speak it, not those of the people who write school books. Continue reading “It’s Pronounced GIF” →