chad

/chad/ , n. 1. [common] The perforated edge strips on printer paper, after
they have been separated from the printed portion. Also called selvage ,
perf , and ripoff. 2. The confetti-like paper bits punched out of cards or
paper tape; this has also been called chaff , computer confetti , and
keypunch droppings. It's reported that this was very old Army slang
(associated with teletypewriters before the computer era), and has been
occasionally sighted in directions for punched-card vote tabulators long
after it passed out of live use among computer programmers in the late
1970s. This sense of chad returned to the mainstream during the finale of
the hotly disputed U.S. presidential election in 2000 via stories about the
Florida vote recounts. Note however that in the revived mainstream usage
chad is not a mass noun and a chad is a single piece of the stuff. There is
an urban legend that chad (sense 2) derives from the Chadless keypunch
(named for its inventor), which cut little u-shaped tabs in the card to make
a hole when the tab folded back, rather than punching out a
circle/rectangle; it was clear that if the Chadless keypunch didn't make
them, then the stuff that other keypunches made had to be chad. However,
serious attempts to track down Chadless as a personal name or U.S. trademark
have failed, casting doubt on this etymology and the U.S. Patent
Classification System uses chadless (small c) as an adjective, suggesting
that chadless derives from chad and not the other way around. There is
another legend that the word was originally acronymic, standing for Card
Hole Aggregate Debris , but this has all the earmarks of a backronym. It has
also been noted that the word chad is Scots dialect for gravel, but nobody
has proposed any plausible reason that card chaff should be thought of as
gravel. None of these etymologies is really plausible. This is one way to be
chad less. (The next cartoon in the Crunchly saga is 75-10-04. The previous
cartoon was 74-12-29.

