ABSTRACT
Picture the situation. It is November 2000.The leadership of the most powerful nation on earth is in the process of being usurped in a bloodless coup.The world’s second largest democracy is telling electors who want their votes counted to shut up and go away. And what are British journalists getting excited about? One little word, of four letters: chad, denoting the small bits of waste paper produced by punching cards. It is not new, though in 2000 it evidently was new to most British journalists. It goes back to the 1940s. But it is kind of odd, quirky – the sort of word to catch a journo’s eye as a piece of shiny paper catches a magpie’s eye.And so, when a row blew up during the US presidential election over whether punched ballot papers had been correctly identified and counted, we had the column inches on chad – where the word came from, what it meant, what different sorts there are, and so on. Euan Ferguson in the Observer, for example, enlarged on chad subspecies:
A dimple chad is a simple indentation. A pregnant chad or nipple chad bulges out but has not been punched through at any point.A hanging-door chad has one corner hanging off slightly; a swing-door chad has two corners hanging, and a tri-chad is one with three corners hanging off. So now you know.
