Whether it’s British, Irish, American, or Singaporean English, little sentence-ending tack-ons like “…and stuff,” “…and all that,” “…and things,” or “…and whatnot” seem to be everywhere these days.

Linguists find that these type of sentence extenders are used across all sorts of world Englishes from the “and that” form more common in New Zealand and Britain to the “…and whatever” or “and stuff” increasingly heard in North America. Such widespread use suggests they must be pretty important to the points we want to get across despite what, on the surface, is incredibly vague.

In linguistics, phrases like “and stuff” or “and things” are referred to as “general extenders,” because they are a way to make the idea being mentioned in a sentence extend to include non-specified but somehow similar items.

For instance, if someone says “I really like to eat fruit and oatmeal and stuff like that” in responding to a question about what they eat for breakfast, “and stuff like that” is a shortcut way to extend the set of things they like........

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