DOMINIC MAGISTRO
Special to The Scallion
America could handle the rampant racism, gun violence, embryo murders and McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce riots, but there is no possible way a nation could withstand the most divisive question since the dawn of computers:
“How is the abbreviated form of the graphics interchange format pronounced? Is it GIF or JIF? Is it pronounced with the hard glottal stop like in gift, or is it pronounced with the ‘J’ sound like in giraffe? Do we even GIF a damn?”
The fighting began in Los Angeles, where urban hipsters decided it should be pronounced JIF. The news spread like wildfire and soon there were big-name celebrities in the computer world like Steve Wozniak saying it should be pronounced GIF.
When asked, Frank Goodall, a junior computer science major, screamed in outrage, “This is ridiculous. It’s graphics interchange format, not jraphics interchange format. What are we, animals?”
In response to Frank’s screaming, a collective of English education majors, in unison, retorted with an exasperated, “That’s not how acronyms work!”
Regardless of the grammatical mechanics involved, college campuses across the nation have been overwhelmed with rioting students demanding faculties to punish the godless heathens on the “other side.”
President Donald Trump weighed in about the campus violence on Twitter. “There’s fault on both sides here, we should just ignore them and call them mini-movies, there’s practically no difference,” claimed Trump.
The Scallion reached out to top news media anchors from foreign countries, Trevor Noah and James Corden.
Trevor Noah, head anchor of “The Daily Show” and South African native, remarked that they don’t worry about it in South Africa, they just let people pronounce it however they want. It’s not like you don’t know what they are talking about.
James Corden, British host of “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” made a remark about the overwhelming violence over the topic. “Where I come from, the government took away the guns because of things like this. Now, the criminals have to stab one another. You’ve never heard of a mass stabbing, now have you?”
The violence has gotten so out of control that President Trump has considered declaring martial law. “The only reason we don’t have martial law is because Dirty Dems are scared a of military state. DISGUSTING!”
You might think that the damage doesn’t seem to have spread to Fredonia.
It bubbled into the village, with local residents breaking water pipes and causing a village-wide need for boiling tap water before use.
Regardless of the pronunciation of the abbreviation, the words of Abraham Lincoln still ring true: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”