![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Kristin Limoges, Allure, 28 July 2022 Japan’s macaque population is thriving, in large part because conservation efforts started after World War II have been a tad too successful. 2022 Allure's Best of Beauty Award testing period is wonderfully exciting, if not even a tad hectic. Clearly this casts "tad" as a different part of speech (adjective rather than noun), which to my mind strongly suggests we're dealing with a neologistic usage rather than something "continuous" from the original sense.Recent Examples on the Web There are times when the evidence presented can feel a tad repetitive, and the frequent cross references between cases can be distracting. I'll also point out that the rise of "a tad bit" mirrors the decline of "a tidy bit". It's often used where a speaker wants to distract attention from the substance of what's being said by using slightly "quirky" wording - no-one knows exactly how much a tad is, so it could be anything from "a detectable (but non-problematic) amount" to "far too much". To my ear, the current usage is an affectation - akin to a mite, or a smidgen/smidgeon/smidgin. 150 years ago it was just a folksy/slang term for a small child (probably from tadpole), but I've never heard it thus used in my lifetime. At the time I assumed perhaps one freelance writer who contributed to several titles just happened to like the expression.īy the 90s it was commonplace in most mass-market magazines, and for the last decade and more I've become accustomed to hearing it in speech too. I recall being exceptionally irritated back in the 80s when "a tad" suddenly became ubiquitous in the rapidly-growing context of personal computing magazines.įor several years, I never saw it anywhere else, but I used to subscribe to several such magazines, and they all used it. I guess ‘a tad’ means ‘a bit’ or ‘a little’ or ‘slightly.’ However, what is good for using ‘a tad’ instead of using ‘a bit’ or ‘a little’ or ‘slightly’? Are there great differences between these three words? Is there any ‘added value’ in using ‘a tad’, in place of familiar ‘a bit’ and ‘a little’ and ‘slightly’? "You're a liberal, so you're probably scared of guns,'' I was told by an. I looked for another example of the use of “a tad” through Google and found the following sentence in “March comes in like a lion, as they say, and goes out like a lamb, and here in the middle of the month I'm feeling a little lamblike and ‘a tad’ lion-ish. (Aside: My initial interest was the adage of “March is not going out quite as lamblike,” which I could easily make out.) “March is not going out quite as lamblike as the adage would have it, which makes the prospect of opening day in New York just a tad less idyllic than one might hope.” The article starts with the following line: I came across the word “a tad” which is unfamiliar to me in today’s New York Times’ article, titled “Yankees Bracing for Cold in Opener and in April.” ![]()
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