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= C =
chad box
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.
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.
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