Gifs that stopped giving

The company behind gifs – those little snippets of video matter that people deploy on social media – has deliberately quoted the opinion of younger users who describe the intrusive items as “cringe”. Why are gifs so annoying and underwhelming, like watching your father dance? Certainly, when used as a device to give reaction to a comment they are hackneyed and second hand. They are worse than those tiresome verbal exclamations “OMG!” or “Wow. Just wow.” It doesn’t help that the libraries of stock responses used by gif-fans often feature characters from American sitcoms of which we know nothing. By the time, maybe quite soon, that gifs become a piece of history perhaps the still hot debate over their pronunciation – with a hard “g” like gift or with a soft one like jiff – will finally have been resolved.