The GIF Survey
Fucking genius survey conducted by the godfather of CSS, Eric Meyer:
The GIF Survey is complete. In just under a week, 1,457 people gave their answers on how they pronounce the acronym, and their perceptions of the rightness of that pronunciation. I thought that, today of all days, it made some sense to share the results of a far less momentous poll.
For those who missed, it, how this survey worked was that the first question was: “How do you pronounce GIF?” To this, the choices were:
- The obviously correct way
- The clearly incorrect way
Upon answering this, respondents moved on to a section that asked three optional demographic questions: age, gender, and race/ethnicity, all as open text fields. These had about a 16% skip rate, and about a 4% ‘faithless’ response rate; that is, answers that were clearly jokes, insults, or other explicit refusals to answer the question as intended.
Once the demographic questions were answered or skipped, there was a final question: “How do you pronounce GIF?”, exactly the same as the first question of the survey. Only this time, the options were:
- Hard G (like “gift”)
- Soft G (like “gin”)
For both pronunciation questions, the answer order was randomized so as to avoid any first-choice advantage. The demographic questions, being open entries, didn’t have options to randomize.
Spoiler: The obviously correct way to pronounce ‘GIF’ is with a Hard G.
Case closed, softies.
It might make you Limp-G people sleep better at night if you think of yourselves as ‘underdogs’, but deep down, you know you’re wrong.
