Linux, musical road-dogging, and daily life by Paul W. Frields
 
So this guy Chad, he has a lot of time on his hands?

So this guy Chad, he has a lot of time on his hands?

This is a very interesting video, but I have a bone to pick. More of a pet peeve. OK, it’s just me being a language fascist.

The word “chad” is its own plural. Or rather, the word means an indeterminate amount as opposed to a thing, meaning it can’t really be effectively pluralized, much like the word “paper” (in the sense of “Give me more paper”). Please, folks, if for some godforsaken reason you have occasion to talk about bits of paper clinging to the punch cards from which someone attempted to forcibly remove them, remember the term is “hanging chad,” not “chads.”

2 Comments

  1. +1 to being pedantic.

    Look, I don’t mind language changing. I applaud language innovators who have an impact on our lives — Chaucer to Shakespeare to Twain to Carroll to Joyce to Faulkner … and I’m sure there have been some non-White European males out there doing the language thing. Snoop Dogg has had a large affect on language in the last ten years.

    But what I think is crap is the way we are all programmable Chatty Cathy’s, mimicking the same sound bites and empty “facts” put forth by the pundits and touted by their media megaphones. I bring that up because I think that is the case here. Along the way of the news coming out of Florida in 2000, ‘chad’ got popularized with an eroneous ‘s’,’ and it’s been-up hanging out like a bad undle mad of fruit.

  2. Pingback: The Grand Fallacy » Cooling off period.

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