What the White House and the president say, goes, right?

As ESPN college football analyst Lee Corso would say: ‘not so fast my friends!’

While the White House is dealing with larger controversies involving the IRS, Benghazi and AP, it thought it had a simple and correct answer for how to pronounce GIF.

GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, is pronounced with a hard G as in “Gif”, with a ‘G’. It took the opening of the White House Tumbler account to make that declaration.

As Dana Carvey might retort in his famous impression of John McLaughlin, the White House is just plain ‘wrong!’ GIF creator Steve Wilhite, who should know, tried to clear up the matter in an interview with The New York Times, insisting that GIF should be pronounced like Jif, as in the peanut butter or doing something quickly.

“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft “G,” pronounced “jif.” End of story,” Wilhite told the Times. Wilhite reportedly received a lifetime achievement award at Tuesday’s Webby Awards.

CompuServe employees perhaps not surprisingly concur with Wilhite, often using the expression ‘Choosy developers choose Gif’ to spread their message.

GIF is a bitmap image format rolled out by CompuServe in the late 1980’s. It supports up to 8 bits per pixel and 256 distinct colors. Those who don’t care for the word GIF, may want to consider that it actually went by the initial generic 87a, before an updated version was called 89a.

Interest in the word GIF has picked up in recent years with it being recognized as a verb and noun in 2012. Due to its impact on journalism and research, the Oxford University Press voted GIF its word of the year.

Thankfully some in the sports and entertainment fields are NOT taking part in the soft or hard G controversy, such as it is. Imagine, for instance, that former New York Giants great Frank Gifford’s last name should have been pronounced “Jifford” all those years.

That’s challenging enough, as Gifford isn’t nearly as outspoken as his wife, Kathie Lee Jifford, er Gifford, who first drew fame as a co-host on “Live with Regis and Kathie Lee” and more recently on the fourth hour of the ‘Today” show with Hoda Kotb.

Clearing all THAT up would have clearly taken longer than a jif, which is how one should pronounce GIF, by the way. It may be enough to make us want to scream ‘REEEGE’!