Exactly *** is a chad?

[glc]

I had a little fun with the OneLook dictionary site.

Webster's 1828 Dictionary:

"CHAD, n. A kind of fish; pronounced shad."

This might be very prophetic - this whole process is getting pretty fishy.

Dictionary.com:

"Chad - A country of north-central Africa. Formerly part of French Equatorial Africa, it became independent in 1960. Ndjamena is the capital and the largest city. Population, 4,405,000."

The way both camps are acting, maybe they belong there instead of here. Good riddance.

"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. obs. 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, and it may now be mainstream; it has been reported seen (1993) in directions for a card-based
voting machine in California.

Historical note: One correspondent believes `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'. There is a legend that the word was originally acronymic, standing for "Card Hole Aggregate
Debris", but this has all the earmarks of a backronym."

Hmm.....ripoff......very prophetic I would say. This particular dictionary is from 1995.