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O.Henry is describing the office of a stock broker.
He mentions ticker tape.
I wonder how many members have ever seen ticker tape.
It was a very long perhaps inch wide roll, and had holes
punched into it electrically by signals sent over telephone,
I guess. A busy broker's office receiving stock market
quotations by it, would accumulate many yards of it during
a day. I remember seeing newreels of Lindberg's parade up Fifth Avenue being festooned with miles of ticker tape.
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I've seen those newsreels, too, wwh. Ticker tape parade. Days gone by. Like chads. No chad parades, however.
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Chad is the stuff that gets poked out of the ticker tape. We had the same sort of stuff as a program storage technique on mainframe computers back in the '70s. The teletypes we used as terminals were fitted out with paper tape punches. I wonder if the 7-bit code (ASCII? EBCDIC?) we used on those paper tapes was the same as used on ticker tapes.
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Can't answer your question, Faldage, but maybe of troy can. She's here this morning.
But would the little bits of paper that a hole puncher punches out be considered to be chads also?
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Ifn you is gone teech them lil kids to talk an rite good you bes lern that they ain' no plural of chad. It's what them langridge hotshots calls a mass noun. I ain gone tell you what the janitor that had to sweep them up called em.
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One chad, two chad, three chad?
Well, Faldage, I see your point, but MW Unabridged disagrees with you on one point in that a single piece can be called a chad--and with two you can add the -s:
Inflected Form(s): -s
Etymology: perhaps from Scots, gravel
: small pieces of paper or cardboard produced in punching paper tape or punch cards; also : a piece of chad
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Mass nouns doesn't get counted. Ain' no sucha thang as one chad, two chad, three chad. One piece of chad, two pieces of chad, three pieces of chad.
Mebbe they shuda abridged it.
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I know what you're saying about mass nouns, Faldage, and I thought it was an honest error on my part. This kind of thing often happens when a term that is unknown to the general population, such as chad, comes into popular use due to an event that looms big in the public consciousness, the questionable winning of the election by George W. being a case in point.
The word chad was certainly unknown to me at that point and I would guess unknown to many here in the States.
However, it is clear in MW that the word can take an 's'--and I do not believe that the editors of MW intended that 's' to only be added to a sliver of a single chad. I think common sense dictates here that the word may be used as the mass noun that you have so correctly pointed out to me, but that the same word may be used for an individual piece. You can have your cake and eat it, too, and I will take your chad and individual pieces known as chad and chads. It seems to be a bit overboard to say that should we slice the individual tiny chad into little bitty pieces, then and only then can we add the 's'. For heavens sake, Faldage: How many occasions would warrant the cutting up of chad?
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You should know by now, Dub Dub', that when I get all prescriptivist* I'm being (mostly) facetious. Although the word chad started out as a mass noun for something essentially uncountable it has become reinterpreted to mean the little theoretically countable elements that make it up.
*Particularly when I get all prescriptivist in that fake unedumicated lingo I insist on dragging out from time to time.
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I still have some programs (in BASIC) on paper tape around here somewhere. Ran on the second computer I had access to (in the summer of '73). A PDP-8 with a whopping 16K of core memory. Bits you could see. There were four teletype terminals hooked up to it. Ah, the noise of information. Anyway, ASCII is only about 40 years old, as a standard. Seems like ticker tapes and teletypes each used their own proprietary codes. http://www.thocp.net/hardware/history_of_teletype_development_.htmhttp://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/teletype.html
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