more chad

[Arnold Zwicky]

i was dismayed to see william safire repeating the confusion
between mass nouns and plural nouns in his On Language column
today.  granted, he was quoting someone else ("Peter Graham,
now university librarian at Syracuse"), but that person is
no linguist, and safire should have known better than to
relay the claim that "the noun was then construed as plural,
on the analogy of _chaff_".

CHAFF is a (singular) mass noun: The chaff is all over the
floor.  *The chaff are all over the floor.  as CHAD was/is
for many people.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), wearying of correcting
  this confusion between meaning and form