no, it's that what you believe to be in your clipboard is not actually in your clipboard, and Word is asking if you want to have that data after it closes and can no longer populate the clipboard.

it has nothing to do with clearing memory.. clearing memory for anticipated use isn't really a thing ever since virtual memory became a thing. (memory isn't prepared for use until after an application actually tries to use it.)

Yep, Excel does something similar where it asks you "you have a large selection copied [(marching ants)], do you want to keep it available after closing Excel?"

wow, that's a big selection. after all, it's just text, right? or am i selling it short? I understand when Adobe notifies that the clipboard is large since it's rasterized (typically) image data. what in the world is in the buffer for Excel that size is pushing limts?

A lot of the time it's not just text, but rich text. For instance I'm pretty sure the font is preserved if you paste into a font-aware app.

okay, but I have way more RAM than even the largest of font's I have encountered (and I've seen a few). also, what an absolute bozo way of doing things to include the font rather than the path to the font

The Rich Text Format specifies the font of each word, etc. That is what the GP meant.

I don't think there is any implication that font files are being included with the data.

Okay but then that's still text to describe how to write more text. How big can that be?