Re: the OP - I’ve always had good response from bicyclesource, but I’m just one state away.
From Livewire (U-Turn), however, my customer service experiences have always been excellent.
Re: customer satisfaction
Why do you need customer service? His stuff is 1.) perfectly made, 2.) delivered on time, 3.) delivered as ordered, and 4.) indestructible.
Oops - this was supposed to be a reply in the bicycle source thread.
Harper - re: Livewire:
I mean service, like when I email him requests or questions, Dave always responds quickly, and imparts his scads of knowledge to me. I am certainly not saying anything is wrong with his stuff.
Always eager to learn. Is this a common dialect word? How would you define scads? How many tads to a scad, for example?
This is a common dialect word meaning a large quantity. A tad is a small quantity. Neither is numerically defined so you may feel free to assign any ratio you like as long as tad/scads<1.
So, is scads always used in the plural, or can you have a single scad of something? Are there kiloscads and nanoscads?
Definitely still on topic here. This is from the “Word Detective.”
Dear Word Detective: Can you tell me where the word “scad” came from, as in “scads of money”? – Edith Freedle, New York City.
Well, as is the case with so many of our most interesting slang words, no one can say precisely where it came from, but we can tell you where it’s been. Slang often seems to pop out of thin air and then, once established, go through several mutations until it arrives at its current modern meaning.
“Scad,” meaning lots of anything, is a case in point. Ask any dictionary, and chances are good it will tell you “origin unknown.” We do know that “scad” first appeared in print in the early 19th century, and that it was an American slang term for “dollar.” In the first recorded citation in 1809, The American Magazine waxed poetic about the fiscal acumen of its citizens: “This land of our dads … is a dinger at nailing the scads,” meaning that Americans were good at making money.
By the middle of the 19th century, “scad” had come to mean large quantities of anything, not just money. It was often heard in the same breath as, and sometimes combined with, “oodles,” giving us the emphatic form “scadoodles,” meaning lots and lots of something. “Scadoodle,” of course, should not be confused with “skedaddle,” which is what you should do if your scads of money came from someone else’s pocket.
In our tradition of boldly going where no dictionary has gone before, I will now hazard a guess as to the ultimate origin of “scad.” “Scad” is also a name applied to various species of food fish harvested in the millions by 18th-century fishermen. It seems likely that anyone searching for a metaphor for either money or “things of which there are many” might think of the enormous schools of “scads.”
Scads actually just means between 27 and 93.
steveyo
I don’t know. I had one scad that was well under 27.
Thanks for clearing that up… 