I. Love. GIFs
Hello, I am Tania and I love GIFs. It’s been about 2 minutes since I used one to communicate how I feel.
Now I know it’s odd in a community dedicated to writing that I am devoting and expressing my love to a single looped moving image. But how can I not! There’s a GIF for every single thing/emotion you want to say or transmit. And even though I am devoted to the written word, sometimes it is true that an image speaks for a thousand words.
Forgetting the debate behind its pronouncement, with a soft j (like in jam, as the creator meant it to be) or a hard almost glottal g (like the word gift without the t, which I, for some reason, prefer and use), the GIF is here to stay! Sure, it’s not deemed scholarly enough to use in professional and serious communications (I can only imagine if written discussions on the next bill to pass in parliament were exchanged resorting to GIFs!), but it will be the best way to express your banter, approval, excitement, sadness, disappointment or even incredulity over a certain topic on a more relaxed manner.
I even have friends who are “GIF famous” (yes, I am making that a thing):
The GIF was created over 30 years ago, believe it or not! Before the world wide web was a common thing. When techies needed to find a way to share images but found those to be incredibly space consuming, a compression algorithm was invented, and the Graphics Interchange Format was born! Well, the GIF as we know it was still on its way, as the first ones were dedicated to still images, and let’s face it, not as fun or mockery filled. But still, the base exists since 1987.
In recent years though, the fame and rate of sharing GIFs has increased astronomically and there’s very little trouble in finding the perfect GIF to portray accurately a moment.
Could that moment be described with use of well thought and combined words? Of course it could! But the giggle you let out when you see the most perfect looped video describe how you’re feeling, is irreplaceable, in my opinion.
And now, here are some of my favourite GIFs of all time.
(Bonus points, did you know this is not Zach Galifianakis, but the one and only heartthrob of the 20th century, Robert Redford? I know!!! My mind was blown by that too)