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Steve Wilhite's slide at the 2013 Webby Awards
Steve Wilhite's slide at the 2013 Webby Awards

The pronunciation of GIF has been disputed since the 1990s. GIF, an acronym for the Graphics Interchange Format, is popularly pronounced in English as a one-syllable word. The most common pronunciations in English are /ɪf/ (listen) (with a soft g as in gin) and /ɡɪf/ (listen) (with a hard g as in gift), differing in the phoneme represented by the letter G. Many public figures and institutions have taken sides in the debate; Steve Wilhite, the file format's creator, gave a speech at the 2013 Webby Awards (slide pictured) arguing that only the soft g pronunciation is correct. Polls show that the hard g pronunciation is more common, although the frequency of each pronunciation varies by region; in addition, some speakers enunciate each letter in GIF, making it / ɛf/ (listen). English dictionaries generally accept both main alternatives as valid, and linguistic analyses show no clear advantage for either main pronunciation based on the pronunciation frequencies of similar English words. (Full article...)

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Guano

Guano is the accumulated excrement of seabirds and bats. As a manure, guano is a highly effective fertilizer due to its exceptionally high content of nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium: key nutrients essential for plant growth. Guano was also, to a lesser extent, sought for the production of gunpowder and other explosive materials. The demand for guano in the 19th century spurred the human colonization of remote bird islands in many parts of the world, resulting in some of the first examples of United States colonialism and the expansion of the British Empire. However, the guano-mining process resulted in ecological degradation through the loss of millions of seabirds. This photograph, taken near Île-de-Bréhat in northwestern France, depicts a herring gull (Larus argentatus) excreting waste, which accumulates to form guano.

Photograph credit: Nicolas Sanchez

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