ooner or later, this interminable presidential election will be, as we say, history. Not so our new friend chad: After one of the speediest invasions ever - from obscurity to ubiquity in a single bound - it looks as if it's here to stay, at least till punch-card ballots are also history.
But what do we know about chad, the word, and its lineage? Origin unknown, say most reference books, including the Oxford English Dictionary, which first spots chad in a 1959 citation. The consensus seems to be that it's a '40s word, coined in the years of punch cards and punch tape to describe the confetti-like trash the new technology generated.
But several sources are propagating a whimsical explanation of chad as if it were accepted truth. The story, posted last week on CNN's Web site, cnn.com, claims that chad is derived from the Chadless keypunch, a machine designed by one Mr. (or Ms.) Chadless that produced no messy scraps. Chad, by this theory, was coined because chadless was heard as an adjective rather than a proper name. The Chadless, or ''chadless,'' machines didn't create bits of wastepaper. So by inference, the paper trail left by other machines became ''chad.''
This chad would be a back-formation, or a word formed by clipping a longer word to a presumed, but nonexistent, root form. We have slippery standards when it comes to back-formations: We accept edit, formed from editor, and televise, from television, but many still raise an eyebrow at liaise and enthuse. When it comes to jargon, though, usefulness trumps history, and chad would have met no resistance.
But is there any truth to the tale? There may be an inventor named Chadless somewhere, but he has so far proved elusive. Three diligent librarians in Boston and New York could find no trace of Chadless, even in patent records that go back to 1790.
So I sent an SOS to the source CNN quotes in its story on chad - yourDictionary.com - and got a prompt callback from Robert Beard, chief linguistic officer of the dictionary Web site. Who is this Chadless? I asked. ''Just a supposition,'' said Beard, professor emeritus of linguistics at Bucknell University. ''It's all over the Web, but the source everyone's using is foldoc'' - the Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing, at foldoc.org.
And there, indeed, is the entry for chadless, alleged etymology and all: ''(Named after its inventor) A card punch which cut little U-shapes in punched cards, rather than punching out a circle or rectangle. ... It was clear that if the Chadless keypunch didn't make them, then the stuff that other keypunches made had to be chad.''
Well, maybe a real Chadless will emerge from the mists of history. But the story has all the meretricious appeal of classic false etymology - the kind of story that tells us sleep tight comes from rope beds and threshold from the ''thresh'' on a dirt floor. Foldoc's editor hadn't replied at deadline time, so we await enlightenment.
Meanwhile, there's another facet of chad's new career worth exploring: Our vigorous embrace has squeezed it into a new form. Reader Lawrence J. Krakauer of Wayland wrote about the metamorphosis after seeing last Monday's Page 1 headline, ''It all comes down to chads.''
''I am quite familiar with the word chad from its common use in the computer field ... over 30 years ago,'' wrote Krakauer. ''But until today's article in the Globe I had never heard the word used as anything but a mass noun. One never spoke of a chad, but one could talk of a piece of chad. There was no plural, chads, any more than one would speak of dusts. A typical sentence was, `I tripped while emptying the chad box under the 026 card punch and spilled the chad all over the floor.'''
The plural chads, however, is recorded in print in 1959; if it was rarely used, that's no doubt because the chad of Krakauer's experience was itself a mass, important only in the aggregate. The perforated strips from sprocket-fed computer paper, the slivers of envelope trimmed off by automatic openers - all these were collective chad, garbage, of no interest as individual pieces.
On those pesky Florida ballots, however, every chad counts, one way or another. We don't care about the mess on the floor - it's the individual bits of paper, which once wouldn't even have been called chad till they popped out completely, that concern us. So in our hour of need, we've made chad the singular and chads the plural. There's no reason we can't continue using the mass noun (all that chad) so long as it has a role. But chads, the formerly neglected plural, is earning its keep, and opposing it would be senseless.
On the other hand, we should resist spreading the Chadless etymology story till someone comes up with a few scraps of evidence. ''When the legend becomes fact, print the legend'' is a great line for a movie, but a dictionary should be able to do better than that.
E-mail theword@globe.com or write Jan Freeman at The Boston Globe, PO Box 2378, Boston, MA 02107-2378. Please include a hometown and phone number.
