Nothing is JUST A WORD - a word - an existential operatorstands for nothing. It DOES NOT stand for something that is not. It does not stand for something that is absent, for to be absent presupposes that the absent entity exists - somewhere else.  Heidegger asks what is philosophy supposed to concern itself with if not with beings, with that which is, as well as with the whole of what is? 

Heidegger wrote: 
"What is not, is surely the nothing. Should philosophy, then, as absolute science, have the nothing as its theme? What can there be apart from nature, history, God, space,  number? We say of each of these, even though in a different sense, that it is. We call it a being. In relating to it, whether theoretically or practically, we are comporting  ourselves toward a being. Beyond all these beings there is nothing. Perhaps there is no other being beyond what has been enumerated, but perhaps, as in the German  idiom for "there is, " es gibt [literally, it gives], still something else is given, something else which indeed is not but which nevertheless, in a sense yet to be determined, is  given.The Basic Problems of Phenomenology.


Here we see Heidegger speculating that there may be something beyond essive presence which is 'nothing, ' and he is not  talking about a spiritual realm here, for he has already covered that by including God in his list of entitative items that he refers to as 'beings, ' or at least comports himself  towards them as beings. Personally I don't comport myself towards history as if it where a being, and I doubt very much whether others think that way either, but conceive of  it like most people - as a word which signifies the totality of records or narrative descriptions of past events. He must have been a queer cove to cognise of history as a  'being, ' and it makes one wonder if he conceptualised all abstract nouns that label subjects or fields of study as 'beings' too? Perhaps he thought of dentistry and  anti-Semitism and prostitution as "beings" too? It is a fact that a curious feature of his writing is to refer to philosophy as if it were a being, and even refers to "being" as a  being" and often refers to it with the pronoun IT (so beloved of Michael) a peculiar belief which is redolent of the superstitions of the uneducated and feeble-minded - that  WORDS are THINGS rather than being symbols that SIGNIFY things.

Heidegger's mistake in his notorious failure to grasp the function of "IS, " which led to his confection of the bizarre so-called "Ontological Difference" was that he didn't grasp  that the meaning of the word "being" is simply another form of "IS" which exhibits the same powers of binding the totality of existential modalities of an entity to that entity  through a mechanism of ontological fusion or semantic unification. In that sense perhaps the "transcendentalist IS" my be better described as: "The Unificatory IS. " For example in a statement such as: "Barbara Castle devoted herself to the Labour Movement with her whole being" the word "being" denotes the ongoing totality or  Gesamtsumme or nexus of the existential modalities of the subject Barbara Castle, and obviously the ongoing totality or Gesamtsumme or nexus of the existential modalities  of the subject Barbara Castle IS - inevitably and unexpectedly - non other than - the subject - Barbara Castle. The so-called "Ontological Difference" is a phantasy - a  chimaera - an illusion. There is NO difference, for the combined experienced events that flow from the interface between the environment and the totality of existential mental  and physical states and modalities that constitute the subject [Barbara Castle]  In other words in the same way that the predicationless or orphanic word "IS" in an expression such as "Barbara Castle is, " represents the total present existential  modalities, (the aggregate of the myriad 'whatnesses, ' or 'essences' of the Scholastics) which are condensed or semantically aggregated and referenced back to the  entity, so the predicationless or orphanic "being" in the sentence: "Barbara Castle devoted herself to the Labour Movement with her whole being. " Every entity, irrespective  of its particular way of being something, can be addressed and talked about by means of the "is. The "is" can be used to reference an individual existential modality such  as "The apple is red" or the total nexus or Gesamtsumme of its aggregated modalic presence as in the sentence: "The apple is. " Heidegger failed to grasp this basic but  critical aspect of the ontological function of the "IS" mechanism, and consequently missed out on a tremendous opportunity to elucidate the question in B&T. Sadly, he was  forced to fall back on the tired old ideas of antiquity - the beliefs that there is a difference between the ontological and the ontic - the so-called Ontological Difference - that  there is an ungraspable, hidden, will of the wisp that is only accessible to the cognoscenti or the depressed or to the angst-driven characters of a Dostoyevskian novel. 


When the "Thinking man's thug" Heidegger moons on about the possibility of there being something "given" or as he puts it - "something else which indeed is not but which  nevertheless, in a sense yet to be determined, is given. " He is again demonstrating his total misunderstanding of basic grammar and ontological reality in that a thing either  exists or it does not exist. There is no realm of nothings fluttering and floating around in nothingness anymore than there are fantastical fairylike tiny-winged Platonic forms of  beauty and symmetry floating around in the ether. To think otherwise in this modern age is to inhabit a world of madness and not to be a philosopher, but to exhibit the wild  phantasies of a crazy loon. Nothing is JUST A WORD - a word that stands for nothing. It DOES NOT stand for something that is not. It does not stand for something that is  absent, for to be absent a thing must BE something.  Putting it bluntly - "fairies" and "being" don't exist
                                  THEY'RE JUST WORDS!