Word: chadness
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...Bush. The Governor spent most of last week holed up at his ranch in remote Crawford, Texas, far from the court battles and the ballot fights and the blizzard of chad, with no cable or satellite TV to jack him into the 24-hour news rush. "We want Bush to stay out of it as much as possible," says a senior adviser. "We want Gore to look like he's desperate, like he'll do anything to win." By contrast, the strategists depicted their man as the very picture of rugged ease, reading the new Joe DiMaggio biography, jogging daily...
...uglier, as Bush's team hammered Gore over the rejected military ballots and stepped up its charge that the manual-recount process was "distorting, reinventing and miscounting" the vote, as Hughes said. Alleging that Bush ballots had been found in Gore piles and that biased workers had taped the chad back into Bush punch holes, the Bush team worked mightily to convince the public that the recount process is polluted beyond measure. Democrats, of course, disagreed...
...know it can be hanging, dimpled, swinging or pregnant, but why on earth is it called a chad...
...Etymological debate is raging even as you read. Chad was the most looked-up word on merriam-webster.com last Friday. One possible derivation is from chat--small, white pieces of rock produced in lead mining. But what rock and paper have to do with each other (particularly without scissors) is unclear. Another theory, advanced by the New Hacker's Dictionary, is that chad stems from the "Chadless" paper punch, thought to be named after its inventor, that keeps the little pieces off the floor--ergo the pieces must be chad. "There is a legend that the word was originally acronymic...
...Stop whining. The American Heritage Dictionary editors nearly deleted chad from the latest edition because they felt it was obsolete. And take pity on the poor foreign-news outlets as they try to translate "pregnant chad." Parlo.com a languages website, offered suggestions: in Cantonese, dye toad tsee (big stomach paper); in German, schwanger Stanzabfall (pregnant punch waste); and in Russian, beremennaya confette (pregnant confetti...