[jwiz]

I hear it a lot in sentences like "Is there a 'kly' command for it or do you have to use the 'gooey'?"

If you are saying it a lot, you pretty quickly adjust to saying a 1-syllable word, instead of saying 3 syllables, whatever your moral stance is. :)

Plus, why should "GUI" get a pronunciation but "CLI" be neglected?

[IncRnd]

> Plus, why should "GUI" get a pronunciation but "CLI" be neglected?

It's probably because the person who made the acronym or initialism had wanted it to be pronounced a certain way and chose a sequence of letters to achieve the desired result. Of course, the speakers of the letter-group will later decide when and how they will pronounce it!

  Acronym: a word formed from the initial letters
  or groups of letters of words in a set phrase or
  series of words and pronounced as a separate word [1]

  Initialism: a set of initials representing a name,
  organization, or the like, with each letter
  pronounced separately [2]

[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/acronym

[2] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/initialism

[NoZebra120vClip]

In the mid-90s, there was some controversy/discussion over how to verbalize "WWW". Very unwieldy in its spelled-out 9-syllable form! So one of my coworkers proposed "dub-three" - two syllables - so sorry it never caught on.