stuff

It’s the day after Christmas. You’ve probably given and gotten lots of stuff, and you’ve probably stuffed yourself to the eyeballs with the usual dinner, featuring turkey with stuffing, and maybe you’ve sat down and watched a classic Christmas movie – A Christmas Carol, Miracle on 34th Street, Elf, Die Hard, Eyes Wide Shut… that kind of stuff. And now, if you’re where I am as I write this, you’re looking out the window and you’re seeing absolutely loads of the white stuff, falling without stop and covering the streets and stopping up traffic. If you have to step out, you’ll really get to show your Canadian stuff: you’ll be shuffling in a stiff breeze through it – your boots sounding like “stuff, stuff, stuff” – or shoveling through it – “Ssstufff! Ssstufff!” And at length you might catch a cold and get a stuffed-up nose.

Well, this is such stuff as Christmas dreams are made on – although, since in the world of clothing and fabric stuff refers to textile, some might take “such stuff as dreams are made on” to mean the pillowcases. What, not what’s inside the pillow? Ah, well, that fill can be stuffing, but it’s only stuff in the way that everything is stuff.

And everything is stuff. From the fabric of the universe to the moral mettle of a person, from the real good stuff to some pretty bad stuff (which are sometimes the same thing), from specific senses in the clothing business and the building trades, through whatever a feature writer or reviewer wants to sound especially authentically thing-y (“this is compelling stuff”), to the most hand-wavey generalizations, there is nothing that is not, in some sense, stuff. Stuff is all the stuff that is in the set of all sets. All that matters and all that is matter is stuff. It is the alpha and omega of mass objects.

But stop for a moment. Why stuff? Why this word consisting of three voiceless consonants – a stop and two fricatives – all said at the front of the mouth plus one neutral central vowel? Why three letters with crossbars, one snake, and one cup (not running over)? Its countable counterpart, thing, has ascenders and descenders, crosses and dots – all the things – and covers the length of the oral cavity, closing with a voiced nasal ringing like a soft gong. But stuff? Just some stuff. Don’t like it? Tough.

And where did we get stuff? Most immediately from Old French estoffer ‘provide the necessaries; equip; furnish’ – the verb and noun forms of stuff have both been around in English since the early 1400s. But, yes, the verb first meant the same in English as in Old French: to provision an army, a town, or a person with all the necessary stuff – arms, food, money. Following soon on that it gained the sense of ‘line or fill with padding’ and – at about the same, not expanding on the clothing sense – ‘fill the inside of a roasting fowl or other piece of meat with another foodstuff’. From those two and similar senses came all the extended versions of the verb that we use now, including any instance of stuffed up or similar reference to clogging and stopping up.

But keep an eye on that. We know that, although stuff can certainly get in the way, the noun stuff doesn’t refer specifically to things that stop things up; it first referred to provisions such as foodstuffs and the various stuff of armies, and has only expanded from that. Its German cousin, Stoff, is altogether neutral and general and is used broadly in compounds: Lehrstoff (‘learning stuff’) ‘educational material’, Lesestoff (‘reading stuff’) ‘reading material’, Kraftstoff (‘power stuff’) ‘fuel’… Say, stuff does seem like a Germanic kind of word, doesn’t it? Well, there is one line of thought that says that the Romance languages got it from a Germanic root, and then the Germanic languages – English, German, Dutch – borrowed it back; this wouldn’t be the only time that has happened. But the conjectural Germanic etymon meant ‘stuff up, plug up, stop’ – in fact, it’s the source of our word stop. 

The problem is that, as I have just said, the earlier senses of stuff in English, and of Old French estoffer, did not relate to blocking and clogging and plugging; they related to equipping, furnishing, supplying. All the good stuff, not the bad stuff. So somehow the ‘stop’ sense would have had to stop, and from ‘stuff that stuffs’ it would have become just ‘stuff’ and ‘needed stuff’, and then later on, atavistically – as if revealing the true stuff it’s made of – the word would have had to come back to that original meaning. I won’t say that’s crazy stuff, but it is not quite the usual stuff of language history.

But anyway, we don’t know for sure. And that’s how it is. The world is full of stuff, and often you don’t really know where the stuff comes from, even if you have staff to deal with your stuff. Sometimes it seems like we have more than enuff stuff, too, ya know? But without stuff, what do you have? Nuffing!