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:
“I were content to wearie out my paine,
To bee Narsissus so she were a spring
To drowne in hir those woes my heart do wring:
And more I wish transformed to remaine:
That whilest I thus in pleasures lappe did lye,
I might refresh desire, which else would die.”
—Thomas Lodge (1558?–1625)
“In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Nature is, after all, the only book that offers important content on every page.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)