You & your buddies can keep pronouncing it jaysawn & sounding like complete dorks if it makes you feel better. However, it was clearly intended to be pronounced naturally as Jason like its inventor pronounces it.

Believing otherwise is almost as bad as the plebs who think the symbol ∅ is inspired by Greek letter φ instead of Scandinavian letter Ø.

SCUBA and NASA are always the ones I use against that argument. It would be Skuh-baa instead of scooba, and neh-sa instead of nah-suh.

And no matter what way it was spelled, it’s the only word we’re still arguing about that literally has a song to go with it to make sure everyone pronounced it correctly. It’s pretty clearly a soft g, because it was a marketing trick, not a dictionary word. It doesn’t have to follow any rules of English, just like all those companies just removing random letters and changing ck for x, etc. Flickr, tumblr, Grindr, scribd, Lyft, Kwik, Cheez, etc etc etc. Twitter was originally even twttr.

I use both pronunciations, but the only argument I’ve ever believed for the proper one is that the creator pronounced it “jif”

Yeah, but they're wrong, so it's hard G

I thought we were having a bit of a joke, but then you really went and gave me a gift of paragraphs.

I think the creator was keeping the joke running by saying that. The word gift is why people prefer to say gif over jif, it's how we were taught to pronounce "gif". The rest of the g words are irrelevant to be honest.

You don’t say “sue-knee” for “CUNY” (City University of New York) Etc.

Of course not, then it would conflict with SUNY (State University of New York)