‘Stuff’. Now a legal term?
From the CBS News article-pages (Example):
Now you're in the public comment zone. What follows is not CBS News stuff; it comes from other people and we don't vouch for it.
Not meaning to be the great language-fascist of the 21st century here... But since when did ‘stuff’ become a legal term? Shouldn’t the term be ‘content’?
Not only is it not a good legal term, and sounds foolish — it also isn’t accurate. Stuff, accourding to my old (1960 ed.) Oxford dictionary is “the material of which a thing is made[...]”.
And the comments of a CBS News story are made of... Well, content, sure. But it’s also made up of paragraphs, sentences, words and even individual letters.
And if we go down that far, none of the page is ‘CBS News stuff’. It’s Microsoft’s ‘stuff’! Microsoft are the manufacturer of the letterforms of Arial. (Why CBS has chosen to rank the fonts in their CSS to ‘Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif’ is beyond me, but that's another story...)
There’s often a reason why we have explicit terms for things, and this is one of those occasions.
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