pejoration of "stuff?"

Mark A. Mandel mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU
Fri May 25 19:01:05 UTC 2007


Larry notes:
>>>
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.
<<<

In _Murder Must Advertise_ (one of Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey
mysteries, drawing on her own experience working in an advertising agency)
there's a scene where Lord Peter is talking about the subtleties of usage
allowed in advertising. He says something like this:

"If you say your perry [i.e., pear cider] is made *from* pears, it must
contain more pears than anything else. But if you say 'made *with* pears',
it need only contain some amount of pears."

m a m

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