Kindles, frowsts, and a GIF that keeps on giffing |
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POPULAR THIS WEEK RE: KINDLE August 8 was International Cat Day, because apparently even international cats deserve their moment in the spotlight. To mark the occasion (and to revisit our occasional series of gratuitous Cute Animal tweets) we posted that a group of kittens is properly called a kindle. And it’s that fact that ended last week as HH’s most popular. Actually, in this context, the word kindle originally meant merely “the young of any animal” when it first appeared in the language in the first half of the thirteenth century; at its root is the same kind, meaning “nature” or “sort”, as in words like kindred and mankind. As a verb, meanwhile, kindle once meant “to give birth to” or “to produce offspring”; although this sense of the word has long since falled out of use (despite appearances, the kindling required to start a campfire is etymologically unrelated), pregnant wildlife or livestock are still sometimes said to be “in kindle” when they are expecting their young. In the late Middle English period, kindle fell out of use as a general word for offspring, and for some reason became particularly attached to litters of kittens. Like many group terms, the earliest record of a kindle of kittens comes from The Book of St Albans, a Tudor period collection of essays on hunting, hawking and other gentlemanly pursuits, that listed “a kyndyll of yong cattis” as one of a number of “terms of venery” way back in 1486. Kindles of kittens, it seems, have been with us ever since. Didn’t get enough cats last week? Take a look at our 15 Facts for International Cat Day here! Elsewhere this week we found out that: |
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POPULAR THIS WEEK THE GIF THAT KEEPS ON GIFFING
Last weekend, the fact that the inventor of the GIF prefers that it be pronounced “jiff” rather than “giff” cropped up on HH. That led to quite a debate about “giffs”, “jiffs” and “G-I-Fs”, and whether or not the inventor of something has any right to tell people how it should be pronounced. (SPOILER ALERT: They don’t.)
We posted a quick survey over on Twitter to test the “giff” vs. “jiff” waters, and more than 4,000 votes later, hard-g “giff” swept to victory with a resounding 78%. But as some of you clever, clever people pointed out at the time, there’s more to this story than meets the eye. So why does the GIF’s inventor prefer “jiff”? And why, despite that fact, do so many people still prefer “giff”? The GIF was invented by American computer programmer Steve Wilhite. Looking to produce a new file type that allowed images to be shared over the grindingly slow dial-up speeds of the time, Wilhite developed a low-resolution “graphics interchange format”, and shared the first GIF—a grainy picture of an aeroplane—via email in 1987. The format soon took off, and remains a cornerstone of online culture: the US arm of Oxford Dictionaries chose GIF as their Word of the Year in 2012, and for his contribution to our online lives Wilhite was awarded the Lifetime Achievement prize at the Webby Awards in 2013.
But it was during Wilhite’s development of the very first GIFs that a joke emerged that would dictate how GIF itself would be pronounced.
For anyone unaware of American peanut butter brands (or for anyone who thinks peanut butter is the devil’s spread, and deserves no place in the human diet), Jif is the name of a popular peanut butter brand sold in the US under the slogan “Choosy Moms Choose Jif”. Among Wilhite’s colleagues, a gag emerged that “choosy” computer programmers “choose GIF” as their preferred image format—and, alongside that fairly silly gag, came the soft-g pronunciation “jiff”. But as the GIF format became better known, a hard-g pronunciation—presumably inspired by comparable and familiar hard-g words like like gift, give, gig and giddy—began to win through. And while Wilhite’s preferred soft-g GIF has its supporters today (including 19% of those in our Twitter poll), the hard-g GIF is now the more dominant form. As we’ve said before and will doubtless say again, however, no one owns the English language. Frankly, it’s really no one’s business to tell people how to use it; the dictionary is there to record language use, not dictate it. As a result, most dictionaries today list both “giff” and “jiff” as acceptable pronunciations of GIF—in much the same way that there are rivalling pronunciations of words like schedule and scone. That’s a fact that even Wilhite himself admitted in an interview with the New York Times in 2013—albeit, somewhat grudgingly. “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” he commented, before adding, “they are wrong. It is a soft g, pronounced ‘jiff.’ End of story.” Seemingly, this is one debate that’s going to run and run... |
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POPULAR THIS WEEK SUNDAY BEST One of the most popular Word of the Day posts for a while on HH was frowst, which we tweeted a few Sundays ago. As we originally put it, frowst is a nineteenth century slang word for “extra time spent in bed on Sundays”. And we thought you might like to know a bit more about it. As a slang term, frowst (which rhymes with “soused”, incidentally, not “ghost”) first emerged in the jargon used by students at Harrow School, one of the oldest and most prestigious independent schools in England. The word’s earliest written record comes from an account of one of the school’s former pupils, Hugh Russell at Harrow: A Sketch of School Life, published in 1880. In “a glossary of some of the words and uses of words peculiar to Harrow” included as an appendix to Russell’s Sketch, the word froust-with-a-U was defined as “extra time in bed on Sundays, saints’ days, and whole holidays.” The same glossary also helpfully recorded that an armchair was known as a frowster. As for where the word itself comes from, frowst the noun comes from frowsty the adjective, which has been used to mean “fusty”, “stale”, or “musty” since the early nineteenth century. Frowsty in turn is probably related to a host of earlier and similar words like frowzy (“ill-ventilated”) and froughty (“stale”, “spoiled”), both of which date back to the mid 1500s. Their origins, however, are a mystery. In any case, it’s presumably the warm, fusty air trapped beneath a heavy quilt, or else the thick, stale air trapped by an unopened bedroom door, that is the origin of the word frowst in this lazy, idling, Sunday-morning context. |
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ANAGRAMS No. 2 Four more tricky anagrams to finish things off this week: the letters of each of these words can be rearranged to spell another dictionary word. What are they? SLOPPY BANTAMS CARTHORSE CHAINSTORE [Answer to last week’s puzzle: ARMPIT, KITCHEN, HANDOUTS, INTEGRATE] |
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