It has been definitive before that the creator of the format says it should be "jif".

I still hold this as an example of a situation where the creator maybe shouldn't be granted the definitive "final say". Sorta like how Prince might say that he has changed his name to a funky ankh/female/male symbol that has no pronunciation. Some people go along with it and say OK, you're "the artist formerly known as Prince". Me, I say you're still just Prince. And to me it is still just "gif" like "gift", even though Steve Wilhite says otherwise.

Wrong according to: http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/si-prefixes.html

Both hard and soft "g" sounds are acceptable pronunciations for gigabyte.

This probably requires some background. The details of the story are not totally clear, and won't be pending an investigation. The facts are that Jonathan Martin left the team after what was described as a "breakdown" in the cafeteria. Apparently the team was pranking him by banding together and refusing to sit with him. This is the sort of behavior you see. Afterwards allegations of physical beating and voice mails were revealed that suggested Richie Incognito (I know, ironic name) was the primary perpetrator of the abuses.

Focus has been on the use of the racial epithet in question. Frankly, I think this is a red herring. I, like many of you, don't really care about the use of that word. That said, I think Shannon is correct in stating there are signs of something deeper here. That is, real actual issues of race relations.

You've heard here that Incognito is thought of as an "honorary black" in that locker room. More background is that Jonathan Martin would have been the third generation in his family to graduate from Harvard, but he decided to go to Stanford instead. It's been suggested that Martin was ostracized more for this reason than anything. He just came from a completely different place than most of the other guys playing. At its root, the allegation is that they made him feel uncomfortable for coming from a wealthy black family.

What I find much more upsetting than any epithet is what I interpreted to be a continuation of the sort of attitude Shannon was talking about. By implying he had used an incorrect word rather than emotionally flubbing its pronunciation the implication, to me, is that his intellect is not being respected. Since this clip is most definitely about race, and that is a common stereotype about black men, I couldn't help but wonder if his skin color biased your judgements. That, to me, is much more troubling than throwing around nigger, fag, or kyke with your friends.

In the end, I think this whole story will blow over. It's just as likely to me that Martin was replaced as a starter, and is now trying to lawyer up (call his parents) to cash out his career. We won't know until they look into it. Still, in this context, I was surprised people here of all places would belittle this sort of commentary, and by extension the commentator. It's disrespectful to the message if nothing else. If you don't find discussions of race relations worth being dignified then I guess I think you're kind of a dick even if you aren't a bigot.

His message came across perfectly clear, even though his pronunciation was off in more instances than just that one. He also clearly had a lot of emotion behind his words, which I think is a good reason to cut him some further slack. His message was important, and deserves to be taken quite seriously.

...That being said, I think it is possible to take the message seriously while at the same time having at least a little giggle about the pronunciation snafus.

One last thing,
I've been thinking about other word pairings that are very similar in phonetic pronunciation, spelling, and meaning. I came up with a few, but, for an example, consider the following:

Think about the difference between the words "sit" and "set"
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sit
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/set

I can set something on a table.
Or
I can sit something on a table.

But!

If I were to say
"I sit my cactus on the table."
It sounds awkward, less natural compared to:
"I set my cactus on the table."
I assume this is because "sitting" usually refers to a person or other conscious something.

I can say
"I set my son on the table."
OR
"I sit my son on the table."
and have them be allllllllllllmost interchangeable.

Still, the difference remains. The subtle difference in meaning requires that the words differ, expanding and exacting our communication.

If Jinx really meant to say that there was a pool of human saliva that the comments were drowning in, he should have used a verb phrase in his comment like this:
"the comments are already drowning in a sea of dribbling"

Very good speech from Hyppönen, once again. It's funny that thru the years, his english pronunciation hasn't improved a lot.. For those that don't know, he's F-Secure spokesperson (and i guess innovator too, he's been there from the start, too bad their products are crap but with out them we would have no security at all..) They made some important inventions in the mid-90s.Some of them CIA fought with tooth and nails like 128bit encryptions claiming it's a security risk if USA can not intercept every signal they get (yes, this problem is OLD...) but F-Secure and other companies, ISPs, everyone were united in this issue and those security measures are now a commonplace...

Hey, if he sucks in six languages he gets a suck-A for wrote-memorization effort and the jurys' still out on pronunciation, inflection, time-and-meter....It'd take a panel of 6 native speakers to decide this, otherwise music always speaks for itself-

Now: Dare we listen??

'Jeopardy!' Contestant Penalized For 'Elaine' Pronunciation has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579 on that post.

You know what... This video has officially turned me against Jeopardy. I think one pronunciation came through the sift a while ago about Wheel of Fortune, and that one was extremely slim-pickins, but this is just bullshit. Wow.

Arnold gets the words right, but the pronunciation is worse than his austrian-english.

Generally, I would agree with you, but not in this context and not to this degree. Every region in American has their own little dialect and is commonly accepted.

The point of the game is to figure out what the phrase is. The parts of the phrase he supposedly mis-pronounced were already revealed so it's not an issue of him trying to "guess" his way through the game.

same with the southern woman. The G she dropped in swimming was already revealed on the board, so to harp on that particular part of the word was bullshit. gee she said "swimmin'" what other word could she have possibly meant?

had the contestants been trying to mumble their way through some part of the phrase that hadn't been revealed, I would be on WoF's side, but that clearly is not the case.

It was a dick move on their part, probably motivated by not wanting to award prize money. end of story.

What's next? They going to screw over someone with a heavy Boston accent? I guess they screen out anyone with a foreign accent if they are that anal about pronunciation. Guess Joe Pesci won't ever be a celebrity contestant.

his meaning was obviously clear. This is no different than the southern servicewoman who got screwed because she said "swimmin'" instead of swimming.

all cracks about southern accents aside, it was OBVIOUS what her meaning was. the only reason they are harping on pronunciation is to have a convenient excuse to not pay out extra money.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Strict-Judging-on-Wheel-of-Fortune

@arekin that would matter only if there were missing letters.
Here all but 1 letter were solved and he clearly pronounced the missing letter as B.
This is not a reverse spelling bee where perfect pronunciation matters.

To be fair pronunciation does matter, otherwise people could see a gap of letters, not know what the words is and slosh some syllables over the missing parts claiming dialect or some such shit. What he said sounded like pure garbage to me.

If I recall correctly, this is not the first time Wheel of Fortune has been extremely dickish and didn't award someone a big prize because of some issue with pronunciation or some pathetically trivial technicality.

Can't believe the show is still on the air.