Peanut butter jelly time

Posted By AnnaMarie Houlis on Jan 24, 2013 | 1 comment

Riley Park, Opinions Editor

If coming to the East Coast has taught me anything, it’s this: no matter how normally you may think that you pronounce a word, there are at least 20 people who will have half a dozen alternate words and/or pronunciations for it and will vociferously proclaim that you are incorrect in your way of doing it. It is infuriating, to speak with perfect candor. Never in my life have I so thoroughly questioned the normalcy and security of my own verbiage as when I’ve gone to college. Sentences are placed in dark pits full of rats and possibly poisoned food, words have giant swinging death scythe pendulums hung above them and any sort of colloquialism is executed with inquisitorial efficiency in the middle of the street, in broad daylight; a war criminal sentenced without a trial.

It all began with the word “pop.” You see, while most of you over on the right hand coast are still inexplicably enamored with sock hops and nostalgic remembering of how your pappy took you to the five and dime to get you a nice sarsaparilla and a hard candy, we over on the left coast were taming the wilds and inventing various plastics and silicon of unequivocally useful usages. Quid pro quo, long story short, what is to us more enlightened and hardy pioneers, “pop” remains to you sorrowfully backwards heathens something called “soda.” I must make mention that I have no innate and hard-wired hatred against the word; I myself have been known to sling the occasional anachronism for the sake of what the kids are calling these days “shits and giggles.” However, upon the first time I ever asked for a delicious and bubbly beverage I was met with a barrage of insults and derisions that were… well, they didn’t make me feel real good.

Why the voracity? Why the hatred against what is just a different word for the same thing? Soda pop seems to be acceptable; occasionally even just calling things a Coke will work. But in my time here I’ve never been able to throw groups of people into a frothing rage of foaming confusion quite as quickly as when I use the word pop.

The delights don’t stop there, folks, for yours is a land of aphorismic superciliousness. The local pronunciation of Get-Us-Burg makes me think we’re living in some sort of centralized meat dissemination plant. No longer do I even try and consult people on the proper vocalization of Lancaster or Worst-Chest-Hair. Such places are beyond my scope of travel, anyhow. But then I noticed that some people get rather uppity when you say Boston wrong. How in St. George’s nose hair do you pronounce such a six-letter construct wrong?

With all the etymological rigmarole and razzmatazz of this eastern jawn, I was thoroughly dethroned from what I had considered a solid grasp of the English language. Gone were the days when I could freely ask about drinks without getting looked up and down as if I had just propositioned those surrounding me to a night of salacious dealings. Torn from me were the mental sanctuaries of phrases I thought might be recognized as usual and banal. I was but a beggar cast upon the unkempt streets of life.

And then, as if it were a terrible angel wreathed in holy fire descending from on high, a savior came upon my rescue. But like all good omens of vengeance it came not in the form I sought it; for here was a word which I was utterly certain of the globalism of utterance. Like the dawning sound of trumpets, it came to me as both the damnation of all I had once held dear and wrong and the deliverance of the new day of linguistic acceptance. That word, my dear friends, is gif.

For those of you not in the know, there are pictures on the internet which move. I’m not talking about videos, mind; I’m talking about pictures which seem to have been, by some cosmic mystery, granted mobility and given a limited but recycling movement which often is applied to photos of cats. You may have seen them litter the dashboards of various Tumblrs or, if you’re of a more sensational nature with your internet depravities, the boards of various chans of four. These internet moving pictures actually have a name and, like jaypegs and empeethrees, they derive their name from the file format which they are: .gif.

Now, being that I am what most would refer to as a nerd and what many may also refer to as an asshole, I have known of this word for a significant portion of my cyber indoctrination. But since the internet can’t talk [yet], I had no absolute way for which to know the proper pronunciation of this word. So, like many, I guessed and went with a hard g sound for the beginning. That phonation has served me tirelessly for nigh on a decade, and I drew haughty comforts in its elocution.

That hipster pleasure was driven from me when, in a casual conversation amongst compatriots, I happened to utter that word and was given a grave look by a close friend. This friend has been a linguistic ally of sorts; she is one of the few people who have enough intelligence to realize that words like soda are reserved for by-gone times and Romney imaginings. But on this point, on this word, we were sorrowfully at arms against another. Suddenly, the one person I could trust to be a bastion of semantic uprightness caved upon me and turned coat. A smattering of back and forth drew the battle lines, and we were placed across the verbal no man’s land from one another for the first time in our friendship.

This matter disturbed me greatly. My precious ego was shattered, for she had the invariably undefeatable position of being in the right. Apparently, the creators of .gif files thought it would be quaint to help people remember what they were called by making the word sound exactly like JIF. Yes, gif is pronounced peanut butter in all actuality, much to my dismay. Her citations were impeccable and I was left once again in my life feeling inadequate in my speech.

So I did the rational thing and decided to take a survey. By rational I suppose I should have added politically before it, but that little correction still won’t make me a management major. The aim of my polling was to prove a point that I believed would make my position correct: that despite the fact that the proper way to pronounce the word is indeed to be with jelly, the way most people know how to pronounce it is with a good hard guh at the start of it.

The surprising thing about this survey is that it ultimately didn’t prove my point at all. The more surprising thing about this survey is that it ultimately didn’t prove her point at all either, for out of the seven people I polled, all seven had no idea what a gif was. The word was alien to them, some foreign substance thrown from my lips with xenomorphic derangement that they could not comprehend. When I explained to them the word meant one of those moving internet pictures, all 7 of them responded that they had in fact never realized there was a word for such a thing as that, and went further to condemn such a need in the first place.

There’s a moral to be had here somewhere. Probably of or relating to the beauty of language as a substance of unending change and amusement, that aether which draws our kindred souls across the voids of consciousness into knowing one another in a special and familiar way like the unique little snowflakes we all are. Another moral might be that I go to great lengths to prove a point and should probably just not let things bug me so much, but where would this article and your time be without that impulse? I say. Perhaps yet another might be that just because there is one way to say something doesn’t mean that there isn’t another and we’re all right in our own ways of doing so despite how many degrading bullyings may be levied against our gentle psyches. But I think the real moral here is that choosy moms choose gif.

Stay frosty.