Hi all: Having spoken it all my life, I thought I knew my English...until I read this thread. Go figure, as they say while schlepping around New York.
I did look up "tad" (meaning "small amount") at the Oxford English Dictionary Online. The first written citation comes from 1940 and was recorded in volume 15 (1940) of
American Speech, a scholarly journal. I was able to find the journal online at an academic library. "Tad" is included in a collection of expressions from late 1930s Tennessee.
Considering that the word was first recorded in Tennessee, but its use is being discussed on a website that is located in the U.K. and used in large part by people from the U.K., I think what we have here is an example of the chicken coming home to roost. That is: many of the early settlers of Tennessee were Scotch-Irish (as we call them in the U.S.) and English. When they settled in Tennessee, many of them lived in isolated rural areas, and I think the word is a relic of the early settlers, brought across the Atlantic. The other Oxford English Dictionary definitions of "tad"--such as a small boy--are recorded much earlier, although all of them do originate in the U.S.
I've attached edited images show the beginning of the article and the end of the article, with "tad" and many other Tennessee expressions.
Oh, yes, where I grew up in the U.S. (Pennsylvania) we also described low-temperature days as "Colder than a witch's t*t in a brass br*."
Regards and a Happy 2009 to all,
John
