The Meaning of Liff

   By Douglas Adams and John Lloyd

The general idea (a brilliant one) of this small book is to use the often peculiar names of British towns to define some common occurrence or situation that doesn't have a word of its own to describe it. The result is hilarious. There has been a sequel since its original publication in 1983. Doing this sort of thing can become a kind of parlor game, best done in an English living room in front of a gas fire with the wind howling outside and the rain pouring down, and with a good supply of beer and Scotch. Use a road atlas. (You are not limited to Britain.)

It is only fair, since we are in effect stealing his material, to put a link to Douglas Adams's home page. He is primarily known as the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, the Dirk Gently Holistic Detective stories, and of course The Meaning of Liff. There are a lot of Adams Fan Web pages on the Internet; at one time, I found his home page, but lost the URL (is there a town called Urlost?). Please let me know if you find it.

Here it is (05/99): www.douglasadams.com (surprise,surprise)

Meaning of Liff Links

DESKTOP VERSION
This one is the entire book in Windows Help format. Run it on your desktop.

HTML WEB SITE
Very nice full version with alphabetical hot links.

TEXT VERSION
This is the entire book in HTML plain text.

TEXT VERSION
So is this (this was the original one I had linked to).

EXTENSIONS
These are some additions my brother wrote.
Obviously other people enjoy this game too.

LEMEL and FLOORSWEEP
I took the 'Liff' idea, but used jargon phrases rather than town names.

There was originally a link to a Stanford University site on my web pages. This went away (as such things do), so to be safe, I have set up this links page for The Meaning of Liff. That way, if one is 'broken' you can try another. --Grobius Shortling, June 1998

MISSISSIPPI
When someone brings out a book like 'The Meaning of Liff' and you think, 'Why the hell didn't I do that book first?!' you're actually experiencing mississippi. Silver medalists invariably exhibit this emotion. --Celius Shortling

If you have anything similar to submit, E-mail Grobius