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