stuff (+ respectively)

Jonathan Lighter wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM
Fri Jun 1 12:15:30 UTC 2007


I advised Jesse some years ago that the OED entry for "stuff" was woefully inadequate, and he's undoubtedly fixing it.

Re "respectively."  MW offers the definition "in the order given," a now central nuance that OED's  def. either overlooks or obscures.  In my reading of the cites, only the most recent seem to illustrate this sense.

JL

Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote: ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender:       American Dialect Society
Poster:       Charles Doyle
Subject:      stuff
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This morning's installment of the comic strip _Candorville_ culminates with Mitt Romney asking the young guy, "So you're saying as a voter, you're more concerned about that stuff?" The young guy's response: "Stuff?" (The "stuff" Romney has referred to is "murder, poverty, cancer, slavery . . . .")

To see the entire strip:

  http://www.candorville.com/wordpress/

--Charlie
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