pejoration of "stuff?"

[Hillary Brown]

There's also the 1985 Larry Cohen movie _The Stuff_, about a consumable (and
delicious) alien goo that eventually takes over your brain if you eat it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090094/

hb

On 5/25/07, Douglas Dee <AmateurLinguist at aol.com> wrote:
>
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Douglas Dee <AmateurLinguist at AOL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: pejoration of "stuff?"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> In a message dated 5/23/2007 11:30:20 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:
>
> >Maybe unadorned stuff is pejorating, but it hasn't gone too far yet.
> >Snapple is still, we are told, "made from the best stuff on earth".
> >The top two such stuffs appear to be water and high fructose corn
> >syrup.  Or actually, maybe not--they never say it's made from *only*
> >the best stuff on earth, so maybe they're just referring to the water.
>
> >LH
>
> I recall a commercial for a competing brand of bottled tea that used
> "stuff"
> pejoratively, referring to Snapple's slogan.  Noting that Snapple was made
> from powdered tea rather than directly from tea leaves, the commercial
> referred
> to the "stuff" (undisolved powder) that can be found at the bottom of a
> Snapple
> bottle.  It urged consumers to try the competing tea without "stuff."
>
> --Doug
>
>
>
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