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:
“Perchance the time will come when we shall not be content to go back and forth upon a raft to some huge Homeric or Shakespearean Indiaman that lies upon the reef, but build a bark out of that wreck and others that are buried in the sands of this desolate island, and such new timber as may be required, in which to sail away to whole new worlds of light and life, where our friends are.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without bothering to read the other.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“Nature is, after all, the only book that offers important content on every page.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)