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From: ronbe@tekred.UUCP (Little Guy)
Newsgroups: net.jokes
Subject: More about holey paper...
Message-ID: <397@tekred.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Sep-85 19:56:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: tekred.397
Posted: Tue Sep 24 19:56:15 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Sep-85 07:15:42 EDT
Reply-To: ronbe@tekred.UUCP (Little Guy)
Organization: The Hollow Tree
Lines: 29

From "What Shall We Call It?" by Flora Johnson Skelly...

The people at the National Public Radio program "All Things
Considered" held a contest not long ago.  They asked their
listeners to come up with a new word, a name for those paper
strips - the ones with the holes in them - that are pulled off
the sides of continuous-feed computer paper.
	Now that was a good idea.  As long as those silly paper
strips are filling up waste-baskets all over the world - this
being, apparently, their principal function - we might as well
name them.  But some of us, it must be said, are not entirely
pleased with the winning word.
	The winner was perfory, which the people at "All Things
Considered" favor because it reminds them of performation - the
perfor in perforation coming from the Latin perforare, to bore
though.  They might have also mentioned, but didn't, that the y
on the end of performy is a suffix - apparently Anglo Norman -
with a variety of uses.  When appended to a verbal base, like
perfor, it turns the verb into a noun, as in perjury or
entreaty.
	So perfory indicated a thing with holes in it, and
that fills the bill.  But some of us preferred one of the
runners-up: chit.
	The person who contributed chit explained it thus:  It
seems that he uses a word processing computer in his job.  His
boss, who happens to be Puerto Rican, doesn't like it when
those paper strips are left on documents printed by the
computer.  So the boss is in the habit of yelling at the
computer operators, "Make sure you take that chit off!"


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