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Comment by CoastalCoder | Hacker News Reader

> Pygfx (pronounced “py-graphics”)

Major tangent, but am I the only one who bristles at someone telling me how to pronounce an abbreviation they invented?

I must have encountered this a few times in brand marketing within the tech world and gotten pissed off at feeling manipulated.

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I can't say you're the only one, but I've certainly never bristled over this before. Or even spared it any thought. And now that I am thinking about it, I find it quite helpful actually, not bristle-worthy at all. I still have no idea how to pronounce GIF or several other acronyms that I commonly use.

You're angry because the author tried to make the library searchable by removing a few letters..?

And they didn't even come up with the gfx shorthand for graphics, its admittedly an old one and barely seen nowadays... But it's always been the sister to sfx/sound effects

It's also likely a reference to the rust library underlying this whole stack (gfx-rs)

Alternatively, "Special Effects". Also VFX/Visual Effects, etc., one supposes.

Although that would have it expand to "Graph Effects" (hmm, that could be an interesting library), or "Graphic Effects".

But GFX expanding to simply "Graphics" has a history going back at least to the early 1990s, and even further:

https://books.google.com/books?id=Jy8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA35&dq=%2...

Whether you are a user bristling at a library author telling you how to pronounce the name of the project, or library author bristling at people mispronouncing the name of the project, in OSS world we all have our things to bristle about but differ in our abilities to influence them.

You aren't.

I feel inclined (especially because they're trying to tell me otherwise) to pronounce it in a rather different way which I shall not make explicit here beyond saying that it splits as pyg/fx rather than as py/gfx.

I think that it is pretty important to both be prescriptive about the pronunciation of abbreviations you create, and to explain them if they are non-obvious.

Way back when I first read about nginx, I had absolutely no way to know that folks usually pronounced it "engine-X". Led to an embarrassing conversation where I and a coworker were completely at cross-purposes to one another.

Obviously there are a bunch of abbreviations with disputed pronunciations (gif/jif, SQL/sequel, etc), and since the creators weren't prescriptive about them, we're all free to argue about them for the rest of time...

Important embarrassing why? In my experience it’s only really important to insufferable people who care about their in-groupness before anything else.

Important because precise communication matters in engineering. I don't mean "embarrassing" in the sense of an in-group, I mean it in the sense that misunderstandings cause engineering mixups that are trivially avoided by clear communication

I mean that seems a bit uncharitable. I don’t think the author communicating their intent behind the name is aggravating or manipulative. It’s simply an explanation. Shouldn’t be worth more than an ‘ah, I see what they’re going for’ and move on.

It’s a sign, not a cop. Doesn’t seem like any undue pressure to control people, or prevent the reader from doing what they will with.

One wonders if the IPA pronunciations on Wikipedia is similarly bristling

do you have the same reaction to people telling you how to pronounce their names or others telling you what pronouns to use?

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