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In looking back over 2024 I am compelled to note that in May of this year John Romero, he of making Doom and helping cement the very genre of the first person shooter fame, said that “gib” is pronounced with a “soft ‘g'” like in “giblets.” Giblets, of course, being the little chunks of people that models would explode into in old first-person shooters when exploded by like, a rocket launcher, or a lightning gun, or whatever. An FPS term now so old that you might play a lot of FPS and not even recognize it.
This caused my colleague Harvey Randall some slight distress. “Mighty allfather of FPS games and co-creator of Doom John Romero decrees that ‘gib’ is pronounced in the most upsetting way possible,” said Mr. Randall in an article at the time.
Except I’d been pronouncing it with a soft g, like giblet, my entire life. Ever since I’d first heard it. This isn’t something we ever had to think about because it’s a shortened version of a real word. The chunks are gibs, yes, the components of giblets. It’s not like gif, for example, which is its own whole word.
Except now it’s totally like gif for the Mr. Randalls of the world, and everyone else who’s been saying gib with a hard g, even though that’s neither how you say giblet nor gin. There are, it seems, many hard-g gib pronouncers among us—ask your Discord group and you might find some real discord.
So honestly what the heck, John? Just don’t answer questions like this because now we have to quibble over pronunciation for the rest of time.
Looking forward to revisiting this in a decade or two when some kind of linguistic consonant shift means we pronounce giblets with a hard G but still pronounce gibs with a soft G. Presumably I am the only person in the world who has this particular nightmare, but by sharing this I have eased my burden.
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Kurt Indovina
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