Etymology Compound of water + stuff. Alternative spellings * water-stuff * water stuff
1
Things containing, associated with, or involving water.
Any application to the atmosphere of thermodynamics which assumes that waterstuff below 0° C. is ice must necessarily lead the investigator into error.1911, Sir Napier Shaw, Forecasting Weather - Page viii:
… title and another mag with a tasty bob-haired girl doing the waterstuff all over some poor boy who no doubt deserves it. Will let you know if anything interesting, er, goes down.2006, Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl
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In the same way as there are not two kinds of stuff, water-stuff and bubble-stuff, but only waterstuff, the absence of which constitutes a bubble, pleasure can be seen as the absence of pain [...]2010, Jan Westerhoff, Twelve Examples of Illusion - Page 158:
It was hot, and all the waterstuff came out of Hof's eye, and then he was blind.2012, Ruth Park, Swords and Crowns and Rings:
waterstuff
noun
Etymology From water + stuff. Calque of Dutch waterstof (“hydrogen”) or German Wasserstoff (“hydrogen”).
This is approximately the heat of exploding what the Germans call bang-gas (mixture of sourstuff and waterstuff), the result being liquid.1887, Jas. Swinburne, “Theory of Secondary Cells” (letter to the editor), The Electrical Journal, Volume 18, p. 482
One day Gröninger, a brilliant young Homoeoid physicist then just at the end of his first year as a graduate student, became convinced that the frequencies of lines in the spectrum of waterstuff are differences between the frequencies …1989, James Binney, “Stellar Dynamics”, in Immo Appenzeller, Harm Jan Habing, Pierre Léna (eds.), Evolution of galaxies: astronomical observations
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Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest.1997, Poul Anderson, Uncleftish Beholding: