Content
The book is a "dictionary of things that there aren't any words for yet". Rather than inventing new words, Adams and Lloyd picked a number of existing place-names, and assigned interesting meanings to them; meanings which can be regarded as on the verge of social existence, and are ready to become recognizable entities.
All the words listed are toponyms, and describe common feelings and objects for which there is no current English word. Examples are Shoeburyness ("The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat which is still warm from somebody else's bottom") and Plymouth ("To relate an amusing story to someone without remembering that it was they who told it to you in the first place").
The book cover usually bears the tagline "This book will change your life", either as part of its cover or as an adhesive label. Liff (a village near Dundee in Scotland) is then defined in the book as "A book, the contents of which are totally belied by its cover. For instance, any book the dust jacket of which bears the words, 'This book will change your life'."
Read more about this topic: The Meaning Of Liff
Famous quotes containing the word content:
“People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Sir Charles: Aren’t you drinking?
Princess Dala: I don’t drink.
Sir Charles: Never?
Princess Dala: I’m quite content with reality, I have no need for escape.
Sir Charles: Well, I enjoy reality as much as the next man, it’s just in my case, fortunately, reality includes a good stiff belt every now and then.”
—Blake Edwards (b. 1922)
“I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition.”
—Thomas Browne (1605–1682)