Chad is a perfectly fine American term. It is in Webster's Ninth and Random House Second Editions. The latter indicates its origin as a computer term in the 1945-1950 period. Shard, or sherd, or the German Scherbe is not synonomous and is correctly use in terms of a fragment that results from a shattering. A punch card is punched with some form of stylus and not shattered. At the height of the punch card era it was the bane of researchers -- I had not heard the term used over the past 10 years. It is a shame that an archaic technology is still employed for something as important as an election. The error rate is on the order of 33 out of 1000, because of the chad problem. As I remember a card punch machine used by a researcher would be passed through a verifyer -- to have two humans make critical entrys, but the chad problem still created an unacceptable error rate for critical analysis. Many of the German terms used in the world of computers have been adapted from the English, so I doubt that Germans would use the inappropriate term, Scherbe. Do we have a German listening in who worked with computers in the 1944-1980 period?