Last week, an email popped into my mailbox with a simple subject: “Jif vs. GIF.” Its sender asked if I was interested in hearing about a peanut butter producer’s interest in “setting the record straight on how to pronounce GIF.”

That’s not quite what I got. The powers that be at Smucker’s advertising department thought we at Ars Technica might bite on their proposal that a new jar of Jif would put the years-long pronunciation debate to rest. Instead, I ended up spending too much time talking about, contemplating, and researching the pronunciation of the letter G—and of other invented brands and acronyms in general.

Does Wilhite have it right?

If you’re wondering, the J.M. Smucker Company—known on the street as Smucker’s—comes down on the “hard-G” side of this debate. The company does this in order to support its latest advertising campaign that says—wouldn’t you know it—the soft-G version has already existed for decades in the form of a massive peanut butter brand. Thus, the people at Smucker’s say, don’t mix up the two. Soft G “jiff” for food; hard G “giff” for an animated image format that came into vogue during GeoCities’ heyday.