A Tech-Culture Skirmish: Gifs
① The Graphics Interchange Format, a file type associated with web animations, is older than the world wide web itself.
② Yet debates over its pronunciation—with a hard "g", as in "gift", or a soft one, as in "giraffe"—rage on, and can make discussions about religion or politics seem comparatively civil.
③ A survey by Stack Overflow, a computer programmers' forum, purported to reflect a global consensus, but would have been fairer had each country's response data been weighted by population.
④ That done, the hard "g" wins out, leading the soft one by 44% to 32%.
⑤ Perhaps the most surprising outcome was the appearance of a third contender.
⑥ Enunciating each letter ("gee eye eff"), though more time-consuming than either single-syllable pronunciation, is common in Asia, and accounted for 21% of the population-weighted sample.
⑦ Around half of respondents from China and 70% from South Korea chose it.
⑧ A question for the ages grows only more complex.
▍生詞好句
skirmish /?sk??m??/: n. 沖突
graphics /?ɡraf?ks/: n. 圖形
animation /an??me??(?)n/: n. 動畫
giraffe /d???raf//d???rɑ?f/: n. 長頸鹿
rage /re?d?/: vi. 激烈進行
civil /?s?v(?)l/: adj. 彬彬有禮的
purport /p??p??t/: vt. 標榜
consensus /k?n?s?ns?s/: n. 共識
weight /we?t/: vt. 賦權(quán)重
enunciate /??n?ns?e?t/: vt. 清晰讀出
time-consuming: adj. 耗時的
syllable /?s?l?b(?)l/: n. 音節(jié)
▍補充詞匯
sageliness within and kingliness without: 內(nèi)圣外王
