TURN ON

What’s so funny about this? This joke couldn’t have existed more than ten years ago. The rate at which new technology comes and goes is astonishingly fast, as is the language created and used to describe it. The hottest and the latest gadget can become an antique in a matter of a few years and people can’t even remember what it was called. That brings us to “wi-fi”. This is a local area wireless technology that allows an electronic device to exchange data or connect to the internet. For example your laptop or smartphone connect wirelessly to the internet as long as they are within range of a wireless router, or “hot spot”. There are endless jokes we could make about ‘hot spots’ but we’ll let that go for another time. Today we are focusing on the pronunciation of wi-fi, spelled w-i hyphen f-i. It’s said with a long letter “I”. Note that the hyphen is between the first ‘i’ and the ‘f’. If we move the hyphen past the ‘f’, it would look like this: wif-I, and would sound as if it were to se