Is equal to ssq(x-y)/length(c(x)). If x and y are of unequal length, the invoked minus-operator will try to make the best out of it by recycling elements of the shorter object (usually you don't want that).
In particular if x is an N x p matrix and y an N x 1 vector, y is subtracted from each column of x, and if y=0 (default) you get the mean of vec(x^2)