Does Nothing Exist?

I was reading a book today in which one character mentions that something "means less than nothing" to them. They are promptly questioned by the naive protagonist as to how anything could be less than nothing and if it was, wouldn't nothing be something? It was quite deep, considering that this is a book aimed at kids - as I've mentioned before, most childrens fiction is brainless sludge. But it brought up another question, perhaps less easy to answer: does "nothing" exist? The quick solution is no - it is nonexistence, therefore it cannot exist. My original meaning when posing the problem however was closer to Is there anywhere, anytime in which there is not something? Is the term "nothing" just a lazy, weak and semi-meaningless idea that we've dreamed up? It's possible. We've not yet discovered a Void in the classic sci-fi sense of the word, though whether we'd find any such area even if it was out there is far from certain. When we say "nothing" we mean Not very much or Nothing I'm able to perceive with my five senses or Something so insignificant it's not worth mentioning. We hardly ever use it as A dearth of any thing. Because, of course, that doesn't really pop up on our experience radar and is scarcely useful in day to day conversation. Why have such a word, then? Indulgence of a penchant for antonyms, perhaps? Good and evil, light and dark, something and . . . It rolls off the mind, doesn't it? I'm really not sure if a Void is logically impossible (though there has to be some way to figure out . . .) but it certainly falls outside of the Pale of both science and faith - giving us no reason to believe in it whatsoever. As far as we know, then, it's a false and misleading concept; in this light, maybe it would be prudent to wield this idea (and its accompanying word) a little less cavalierly.