Gif stands for Graphics Interchange Format. when graphics is pronounced “JAFFICKS” Then I will pronounce Gif with a “J”
^ This
It’s followed by an R of course it would be a hard g. But Giraffe is a soft g. Genius is a soft g. Gin is pronounced with a soft g too. GIF is I following a g, it would be pronounced with a soft g.
It aint Jif peanut butter though.
It would still be pronounced like that. The general rule is if the g is followed by an e or i, it’s soft g. U or a consonant is generally a hard g.
I will DIE WITH MY HONOR
Gear =/= Jear
Get =/= Jet
Gift =/= Jift
Give =/= Jive
In English, words with a ‘G’ followed by an ‘e’ or an ‘i’ can be pronounced with either a hard ‘G’ or a soft ‘G’.
Words with Germanic roots such as ‘gear’, ‘get’, ‘gift’, ‘give’ (see above) are pronounced with a hard ‘g’ while words with Latin or Greek roots such as ‘gem’, ‘general’, ‘giraffe’, ‘giant’, are pronounced with a soft ‘g’.
So no, it’s not exactly a “general rule” that ‘g’ followed by an ‘e’ or an ‘i’ makes a soft ‘g’ sound.
Additionally, “GIF” is an ACRONYM starting with a word that begins with a hard ‘g’ sound, so “GIF” is therefore pronounced with a hard ‘g’.
I’ve seen this photograph very frequently on tumblr and Facebook, always with the simple caption, “Ghost Heart”. What exactly is a ghost heart?
More than 3,200 people are on the waiting list for a heart transplant in the United States. Some won’t survive the wait. Last year, 340 died before a new heart was found.
The solution: Take a pig heart, soak it in an ingredient commonly found in shampoo and wash away the cells until you’re left with a protein scaffold that is to a heart what two-by-four framing is to a house.
Then inject that ghost heart, as it’s called, with hundreds of millions of blood or bone-marrow stem cells from a person who needs a heart transplant, place it in a bioreactor - a box with artificial lungs and tubes that pump oxygen and blood into it - and wait as the ghost heart begins to mature into a new, beating human heart.
Doris Taylor, director of regenerative medicine research at the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, has been working on this– first using rat hearts, then pig hearts and human hearts - for years.
The process is called decellularization and it is a tissue engineering technique designed to strip out the cells from a donor organ, leaving nothing but connective tissue that used to hold the cells in place.
This scaffold of connective tissue - called a “ghost organ” for its pale and almost translucent appearance - can then be reseeded with a patient’s own cells, with the goal of regenerating an organ that can be transplanted into the patient without fear of tissue rejection.
This ghost heart is ready to be injected with a transplant recipient’s stem cells so a new heart - one that won’t be rejected - can be grown.
The most famous thing that happened today was the linking of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah on May 10, 1869. So, um, railroads!
Although I think I remember the ending of that story a bit wrong
There’s something very reliable about a biscuit tin.
A good biscuit tin will see you through many years. It can be thrown in the back of a press, or used as a paperweight, or to keep a stack of books off a weight desk. It might be dented, with the paint coming off at the edges and a lid that sticks when you try to open it from one particular side, but it still keeps your biscuits fresh, and that’s what matters.
Some friendships are the same.
Minerva McGonnagall is a ginger nut woman. A ginger nut is a practical biscuit - spicy, so that you don’t want too many, filling, to keep you going between classes, and firm, so they don’t break when you dunk them in a cup of tea. She keeps a tin of ginger nuts - a practical, red tartan tin, that’s always just nicely full - on her desk, beside her tin of teabags. It’s a useful weapon to wield against a crying first-year, especially one who doesn’t expect even so much as her brusque brand of affection so far from home.
She never offers the red-and-green tin of jammy dodgers to her students. Even on special occasions, when the lozenge-shaped tin of Ginger Newts comes out, the tin of jammy dodgers stays in the very bottom drawer of her desk, with the decanter of brandy.
She can’t abide jammy dodgers, and thinks brandy is a waste of good money, but friendship means sacrifices must be made.
Horace Slughorn has always appreciated a good jammy dodger. There’s something immensely satisfying in the squish and crunch of a homemade shortbread-and-strawberry jam dodger, a satisfaction that sometimes encourages an otherwise quiet student to open up - because contrary to popular opinion, his office is open to more than just the Slug Club, and the overflowing green paisley biscuit tin on his desk is always open, too.
Of course, he has a tin of Jammy Bludgers for special occasions. He has a bright red tartan tin hidden behind his spare cauldron, too, with a bottle of good Highland whiskey.
Ginger nuts are a sin against biscuits, and whiskey is just brandy that couldn’t cut the mustard, but he keeps them all the same.
There are evenings when the red tartan tin emerges from behind the spare cauldron, and late nights when the red-and-green tin is brought out of the bottom drawer. The paint is scraped off the edges of the red-and-green tin, and the tartan tin’s lid sticks if you try lifting it from the short side, but they’re just marks of character.
There’s something very reliable about a biscuit tin, after all.
“Harry Potter is dead. He was killed as he ran away, trying to save himself while you lay down your lives for him. We bring you his body as proof that your hero is gone. The battle is won. You have lost half of your fighters. My Death Eaters outnumber you, and the Boy Who Lived is finished. There must
be no more war. Anyone who continues to resist, man, woman or child, will be slaughtered, as will every member of their family. Come out of the castle now, kneel before me, and you shall be spared. Your parents and children, your brothers and sisters will live and be forgiven, and you will join me in the new world we shall build together.”
