chad

   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.)

[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {chad}{chad box}{computer confetti}{perf}{punched card}{ripoff}{selvage}]