原创 This is not your usual dictionary

Since we just recently entered a brand-spanking-new year, it perhaps behooves us to pause for a moment to contemplate the meaning of liff. What? No, I don’t mean the meaning of life. I'm talking about the book called The Meaning of Liff by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd.

Actually, I hang my head in shame when I admit that I had never heard of this little beauty before, even though the original edition was published way back in the mists of time we used to call 1983. (That's more than 30 years ago -- eek!) I'm a huge fan of Douglas Adams, so I have no idea how this little scamp (the book, not Douglas Adams) slipped under my radar. The first I knew of it was when my little bro' gave me a copy of the "new and unimproved" edition for Christmas.

This is such a clever book. It's a dictionary of things for which there currently are no words. The really clever part is that, rather than creating new words from scratch, the authors simply assign new meanings to existing place-names.

Opening the book at random, for example, we find the following:

Alcoy adj.
Wanting to be bullied into having another drink.

Berriwillock n.
An unknown workmate who writes "All the best" on your leaving card.

Clakavoid n.
The technical term for a single page of script from an Australian soap opera.

Dungeness n.
The uneasy feeling that the plastic handles of the overloaded supermarket carrier-bag you are carrying are getting steadily longer.

Many of these are laugh-out-loud funny. Also amusing is the fact that each reader will find different entries to be funnier (or not, as the case might be).

In fact, this book has turned out to be very educational, because I've found myself using Google Earth on my iPad to locate and "visit" many of the more unusual place names.

Also very poignant is the back-and-forth dialog between the authors in the prefaces to the various editions. For example, the preface to the 1988 reprint reads as follows:

Did you get the preface I faxed you from New Zealand?
-- Douglas Adams, Zaire, 1988

This is followed by the preface to the 1989 reprint, which reads as follows:

No.
-- John Lloyd, Lambeth, 1989

Douglas Adams was born in 1952 -- just five years before yours truly. In addition to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he also wrote such classics as Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. He passed away from a heart attack in 2001 at only 49 years of age.

Like so many other people, Douglas Adams was cut down before his time. The scary thing is that any of us could shrug off this mortal coil at any time. All I can say as we stand at the beginning of this new year is that life is very, very precious, and that we should all do our best to make the most of it and to help others make the most of it also. So let's all go forth and make the world a happier place!