Aristotle himself described his subject matter in a variety of ways: as the ‘first philosophy,’ or ‘the study of being qua being,’ but what he actually meant by 'being' has remained a hotly disputed question from that day to this.

Yes, 'substance' is another slippery customer, yet our police forces seem to have no difficulties in establishing that if you are caught with marijuana or heroin on your person that you are guilty of carrying a weighable substance - and yet... do my words have any substance, or what is the substance of what I am trying to say?

In addition to the modern Greeks employing the word 'ousiodis' for ‘material,’ they also use 'periousia' for property and wealth, 'ousia' for substance and savour and essence, and 'anoisia' for ‘stuff.”  "Ousia" is just the present continuous participle of "einai, to be, " i.e. "being." Patristic theologians, most notably at Nicea, seized upon it (homoousios, una substantia, one substance), and made it become an important property of the Scholastics, thence imbedded in modern philosophical discourse. I am tempted to conclude that there is far too much coincidence in this original meaning to accept an ontological equivalency of meaning between the ancient and the modern renderings. As I said – I am ‘tempted,’ but I will resist the temptation until I have accomplished a more rigorous and comprehensive survey and comparison of all of the instances of 'ousia' in every Greek text that I can get my hands on in order to see how it stacks up semantically.

My present thinking is that apart from its conjugational duties as the verb of the continuous present tense, ousia also represents in its philosophical role all that belongs to a human, both intrinsically as a feature of his physical and mental characteristics or properties, and also his or her extrinsic or external properties in the sense of worldly goods, material wealth, worldly appurtenances and fortunes – in fact precisely the overall existential material nexus or objective Gesamtsumme which I believe any human presents.

What I believe it DOESN’T represent to Aristotle, or even Plato, is some nebulous, cosmic universal or for that matter a spirituous Daseinic Man Friday, which keeps company with a bloke as he circumambulates around the island of existence between life and death. I propose that it was not Aristotle's intention that 'Being' should be construed as denoting the essential equality and interchangeability of 'Being'  as corresponding to the soul or the ego – or the anima – or one’s consciousness of one’s own physical identity, or the personality or nature of somebody else.  We must lay the responsibility for this deliberate  semantic mutation at the door of the theologians who re-engined the word as they cross-fertilised the Arabic grammaticalised rendition  of the verb einai, in its continuous present version, dyadically with an aeonian soul, which after death, is capable of taking flight on butterfly wings to a place elsewhere in an upwards or downwards direction. We shall explore the influence of the Arab translators of Aristotle in later chapters

Whilst these Modern Greek examples are not a definite proof that the word "ousia" included this (hard) concept of materiality in Ancient Greek, and accepting that diachronic distortion may have occurred, and taking all these caveats into consideration, the modern use of 'ousiodis' for material and 'periousia' for property and wealth, 'ousia' for substance and savour and essence, and 'anoisia' for ‘stuff does seem to provide further evidence that 'ousia' may have been even less concerned with the concept of insubstantiality than is presently believed?

If Grice could only have had his way, and a univocal understanding of BE were to be established amongst the thinking classes of the world.

Philosophical thinkers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your ontological chains!