The Right Word in the Right Place at the Right Time by William Safire Page A
Authors: William Safire
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rudiments of communication.
Laurence Urdang
Old Lyme, Connecticut
In counting the mistakes contained in the United States Census, you seem to have made one of your own. You use the phrase “obviate the need for …” This appears to me a redundancy, as the common meaning of obviate is “to make unnecessary.” To make a need unneeded is surplussage at its best. You have suggested many ways the Census could eliminate excess verbiage; so too could have you.
Andrew J. Heimert
Washington, D.C.
If one wants to get the structure across, unforgettably, one would say, “use black pencil, only.” That is more demanding and retentive. A pause in the expression, if oral, and a comma before the last word achieves the result in the interim between instruction and performance.
Judge Milton Pollack
U.S. Senior District Judge
U.S. District Court
New York, New York
Chad. The word of the year is chad . Its current sense is defined in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE ) as “the small bit of paper released when a ballot is punched or a paper punch is used.”
This meaning of this single-syllable noun was a mystery to most when it first poked its head through the tape of language in the counting of ballots in Florida. But some Californians were familiar with it. In 1981, the Los Angeles Times reported, “What the city is trying to avoid is a repeat of April’s Great Chad Chore, when more than 40,000 ballots had to be recounted because their chads —the punched-out portions—failed to break loose.”
At that time, one of DARE ’s lexicographers noted that the word “is used only by people in the ballot-counting business, not by other users of computer cards, who seem to call the same bits of cardboard ‘confetti.’ ” But according to Peter Graham, now university librarian at Syracuse, who served early in his career as a keypunch operator, “We had what we called a chad box underneath the key punch. We resisted calling it ‘confetti’ because the small bits of paper, when they caught on your clothes, would not dislodge.” Graham notes that the noun was then construed as plural, on the analogy of chaff, but today’s ballot counters are referring to chads, construing the word chad as singular.
The first use in this sense is in the files of Merriam-Webster: “The small discs, called chads, “ noted the RCA Review in 1947, “… are perforated only sufficiently to permit the chads to rise like small hinged lids in response to the sensing pins of a transmitter.”
A presidential election appeared to hinge on those hinges. Their near-infinite variety was listed by Katharine Q. Seelye in the New York Times : “Variants include dimpled chad (bulging but not pierced), pregnant chad (attached by all four corners to a ballot that is either bulging or pierced), hanging chad (attached by a single corner), swinging-door chad (attached by two corners) and tri chad (attached by three corners).” Bruce Rogow, an attorney for Florida election supervisors, explained with a straight face, “Pregnancy does not count in Palm Beach County, only penetration.”
Other meanings exist. The oldest is from the Middle English ich hadde, pronounced shad or chad, meaning “I had” (and legitimizing the Wall Street Journal headline, “ Chad Enough?”). According to the Venerable Bede, an especially humble priest became St. Chad (and his feast day is March 2, for those ballot counters who want to celebrate it). And the nation of Chad, formerly part of French Equatorial Africa, took its name from Lake Chad, from a word in the Nilo-Saharan language of Kanuri meaning “an expanse of water.” According to the 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, traders stopped in what is now northeastern Nigeria to take on water.
But now let’s see where the sense of “small bit of paper” comes from. Merriam-Webster took a shot at it in the Third Unabridged as derived from the Scottish for “gravel,” but its current
Laurence Urdang
Old Lyme, Connecticut
In counting the mistakes contained in the United States Census, you seem to have made one of your own. You use the phrase “obviate the need for …” This appears to me a redundancy, as the common meaning of obviate is “to make unnecessary.” To make a need unneeded is surplussage at its best. You have suggested many ways the Census could eliminate excess verbiage; so too could have you.
Andrew J. Heimert
Washington, D.C.
If one wants to get the structure across, unforgettably, one would say, “use black pencil, only.” That is more demanding and retentive. A pause in the expression, if oral, and a comma before the last word achieves the result in the interim between instruction and performance.
Judge Milton Pollack
U.S. Senior District Judge
U.S. District Court
New York, New York
Chad. The word of the year is chad . Its current sense is defined in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE ) as “the small bit of paper released when a ballot is punched or a paper punch is used.”
This meaning of this single-syllable noun was a mystery to most when it first poked its head through the tape of language in the counting of ballots in Florida. But some Californians were familiar with it. In 1981, the Los Angeles Times reported, “What the city is trying to avoid is a repeat of April’s Great Chad Chore, when more than 40,000 ballots had to be recounted because their chads —the punched-out portions—failed to break loose.”
At that time, one of DARE ’s lexicographers noted that the word “is used only by people in the ballot-counting business, not by other users of computer cards, who seem to call the same bits of cardboard ‘confetti.’ ” But according to Peter Graham, now university librarian at Syracuse, who served early in his career as a keypunch operator, “We had what we called a chad box underneath the key punch. We resisted calling it ‘confetti’ because the small bits of paper, when they caught on your clothes, would not dislodge.” Graham notes that the noun was then construed as plural, on the analogy of chaff, but today’s ballot counters are referring to chads, construing the word chad as singular.
The first use in this sense is in the files of Merriam-Webster: “The small discs, called chads, “ noted the RCA Review in 1947, “… are perforated only sufficiently to permit the chads to rise like small hinged lids in response to the sensing pins of a transmitter.”
A presidential election appeared to hinge on those hinges. Their near-infinite variety was listed by Katharine Q. Seelye in the New York Times : “Variants include dimpled chad (bulging but not pierced), pregnant chad (attached by all four corners to a ballot that is either bulging or pierced), hanging chad (attached by a single corner), swinging-door chad (attached by two corners) and tri chad (attached by three corners).” Bruce Rogow, an attorney for Florida election supervisors, explained with a straight face, “Pregnancy does not count in Palm Beach County, only penetration.”
Other meanings exist. The oldest is from the Middle English ich hadde, pronounced shad or chad, meaning “I had” (and legitimizing the Wall Street Journal headline, “ Chad Enough?”). According to the Venerable Bede, an especially humble priest became St. Chad (and his feast day is March 2, for those ballot counters who want to celebrate it). And the nation of Chad, formerly part of French Equatorial Africa, took its name from Lake Chad, from a word in the Nilo-Saharan language of Kanuri meaning “an expanse of water.” According to the 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, traders stopped in what is now northeastern Nigeria to take on water.
But now let’s see where the sense of “small bit of paper” comes from. Merriam-Webster took a shot at it in the Third Unabridged as derived from the Scottish for “gravel,” but its current
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