Chapter 5

How to Crop, Resize
& Stuff Like That

You’ll Do This Stuff a Lot

Did you know that the most-used tool in all of Photoshop is the Crop tool? Well, it’s true. People apparently crop the daylights out of everything, but there’s something else—a word—that we need to focus on here because it’s one of the most powerful words in the English language (even more powerful than the word “love”), and that word is “stuff.” That’s right, you’re going to learn some “stuff” and that makes this a very valuable chapter indeed. What exactly is “stuff”? Well, it’s not what you think, and most people who have studied linguistics at a university level are surprised to learn that “stuff” is actually not a word, but an acronym that over the years has become so commonly used that it has become a part of our daily vernacular. It stands for “Stuff That Usually Fills Fannies,” but for many years what threw researchers off was the fact that an acronym rarely contains the same acronym within the acronym itself (which, by the way, was the inspiration for the 2010 hit movie Inception, starring Whoopi Goldberg and Mark Wahlberg). Anyway, over the years, the acronym STUFF has gained such power for its all-encompassing reach to describe a series of random things that Time magazine actually chose it as its 2013 “Word of the Year,” and His Grace the Duke of Leicester made it a part of the UK’s official “Words of Great Distinction” during a coronation in 1998 (which was attended by The Baroness of Heimlich). This honor was just one of many accolades this popular catch-all word has received from academia to governments around the world, who have embraced its charm and usefulness in modern-day society. So, in short, you should embrace this “Stuff That Usually Fills Fannies” with open arms.