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To Our Readers
I HOPE this election thing is solved before you read this, but as slow as it's moving I suspect we won't be much nearer to a resolution. Lately, it's all about chad. Chad: ‘Card Hole
Aggregate Debris’Perhaps you once thought "Chad" was a sumo wrestler from Hawaii or a landlocked nation in Africa bounded on the north by Libya, the west by Niger, Nigeria and Cameroon, the south by the Central African Republic and the east by Sudan.
By now, however, we know chad is the focus of the battle for the presidency. According to dictionary.com, these chad (or "chaff," "computer confetti," "keypunch droppings") are "the confetti-like bits punched out of punched cards or paper tape." Specifically, they are the paper from the pukas in a punch-card ballot.
According to the Web site www.jargonfile.org, "the word 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. If the Chadless keypunch didn't make them, then the stuff that other keypunches made had to be 'chad.'
"There is a legend that the word was originally acronymic, standing for 'Card Hole Aggregate Debris.'" I like that, but the Jargon File folks admit it's probably a "backronym" dreamed up after the fact.
We used the word in the army in 1967 when I worked in a NATO communications relay in Italy. Our teletypes used miles of punched paper tape. The tapes were different colors depending on whether the circuit was unclassified, confidential or secret.
New teletype operators never had a clue what chad was and our jobs were boring, so we entertained ourselves by sending new guys to the supply room to get a box of unclassified chad. After I was humiliated by the supply sergeant and then, returning empty-handed and red-faced, by the entire relay room crew, I will never forget the word chad.
We never knew about "dimpled," "finger-nailed" and "pregnant" chad, though. Jargon always seems to rise to the occasion.
John Flanagan is editor and publisher of the Star-Bulletin.
To reach him call 525-8612, fax to 523-8509, send
e-mail to publisher@starbulletin.com or write to
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, Hawaii 96802.