The Original Meaning of Liff

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Have you ever heard of a radlett? It’s defined as the ‘single hemisphere of dried pea which is invariably found in an otherwise spotlessly clean saucepan’. Or how about a lulworth, a ‘measure of conversation’ which ‘defines the amount of the length, loudness and embarrassment of a statement you make when everyone else in the room unaccountably stops talking at the same moment’? Or a skoonspruit, the ‘tiny garden sprinkler thing your mouth sometimes does for no apparent reason’?

These three words – radlett, lulworth, and skoonspruit – are not ‘words’ you’ll find in the dictionary. At least, not in the OED or Collins Dictionary or even Chambers, that dictionary which likes to have a little fun with some of its definitions (see ‘éclair: a cake, long in shape but short in duration’).

Instead, this trio of words can be found in The Deeper Meaning of Liff, the expanded version of The Meaning of Liff, a book which appeared in 1983. Its authors were John Lloyd and the late Douglas Adams. Adams is best-known as the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but Lloyd was Adams’s co-writer for the original radio show which spawned the subsequent books, as well as the TV and film adaptations. Lloyd went on to change the face of British comedy by producing shows like Not the Nine O’clock News, Blackadder, and Spitting Image, before creating QI.

The Deeper Meaning of Liff (I have the original somewhere too, but it’s lost amidst the chaos of my bookshelves in my study at home, or else it’s languishing on my office bookshelves at the university) is the subject of this week’s piece of bloggery. It’s one of those books which can be relied on to raise a smile and, if you’re like me, more than a few chuckles. It’s verbally inventive, doing witty things with language, while also being a classic piece of observational comedy.

Each entry in the book takes a place name – often that of a small British village or town – and then uses it to define a peculiar phenomenon which we may have experienced but not necessarily noticed. It’s a humorous dictionary for things which we don’t have words for yet. Some of the coinages are good old-fashioned puns: a lyminster, for example, is ‘a homosexual vicar’, and a rigolet is ‘as much of an opera as most people can sit through’. (Lyminster, by the way, is a village in West Sussex, England, while Rigolet is a remote coastal community in Labrador, Canada.)

Others rely more vaguely on particular sounds of words which are then brilliantly but indefinably (as it were) linked to a particular state: scosthrop, for instance, being ‘to make vague opening or cutting movements with the hands when wandering about looking for a tin opener, scissors, etc., in the hope that this will help in some way’. It’s that ‘in some way’ which makes it for me.

Sometimes, these phenomena do already have words for them: rhymney, for instance, is ‘that part of a song lyric which you suddenly discover you’ve been mishearing for years’, which sounds similar to the existing idea of the mondegreen. But mostly, they’re experiences which we can recognise but could never name. At least, until now.

Douglas Adams got the idea for this parlour game from one of his schoolteachers, but that schoolteacher, in turn, probably got it from Paul Jennings (1918-89), the journalist and humourist who wrote an article (as part of his regular Observer column) in the 1950s titled ‘Ware, Wye, Watford’.

In that article, Jennings inaugurated the concept which Adams and Lloyd would later raise to a high art. But Jennings’ place-names-as-words-for-everyday-things are very good, too, such as the suggestion of babbacombe for ‘an idle or nonsensical rumour’ or dunstable as another word for ‘possible’.

But to home in on one word in particular is to highlight the different strains of humour the different authors employ. Take kettering, ‘defined’ (rather beautifully) by Jennings ‘like the flight of a butterfly’; Adams and Lloyd, by contrast, have ‘the marks left on your bottom or thighs after sunbathing on a wickerwork chair’. Both work, reminding us of the fundamental arbitrariness of human language, whereby that thing with leaves and branches outside can be an arbre in French but a ‘tree’ in English. (How’s that for arbitrary/arbre-tree?)

Both Jennings’ original concept and The Meaning of Liff (and The Deeper Meaning of Liff; not to mention Lloyd’s sequel with Jon Canter, Afterliff) are examples of a curious little microgenre: the spoof dictionary. Another glorious example of this mini-genre is Roger’s Profanisaurus from Viz magazine. If you can stomach humour that’s rather more sexual and scatological, this is another book guaranteed to make you laugh out loud (and aptly enough, the ideal ‘toilet book’ for the smallest room of the house).

But the ultimate originator of the parody dictionary – or at least the very first person to raise the form to high art – was Ambrose Bierce, whose Devil’s Dictionary took existing words and redefined them for comic effect. Examples include admiration (‘our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves’), clairvoyant (‘a person, commonly a woman, who has the power of seeing that which is invisible to her patron – namely, that he is a blockhead’), and prayer (‘to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy’).

Honestly, they’re all worth reading. But I’d better stop quoting my favourite examples from The Deeper Meaning of Liff and just advise you to seek out a copy. Otherwise I might be guilty of a ripon: the practice of including ‘all the best jokes from the book in the review to make it look as if the critic thought of them’.