I didn't think that a mock dictionary would be something you could sit down and read through in one sitting... but - at least with this one - you can. Douglas Adams is brilliant, and at least 1/3 of the words in this book I felt I should scribble down and use immediately.
I really want to keep this book, but I know deep in my heart that if this vocabulary hasn't caught on in the past 30 years, nothing I can do will make it. So I have to pass it on for the next person to enjoy. It is quite the abalemma, though.

This year, the wonderful Meaning of Liff and I share a milestone birthday. Imagine my excitement at the prospect of a sequel to this masterpiece 30 years after the first edition. So it seemed like a good time to read the version on my bookshelf again in anticipation.

Written by the unstoppable duo Douglas Adams (if you haven’t read the Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy of five, you are missing out on some magic) and John Lloyd (QI creator), The Deeper Meaning of Liff is a hilarious dictionary-style book that assigns meanings to place names.

In the preface of the original book, The Meaning of Liff (1983), Adams and Lloyd explain: ‘Our job, as we see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep…’

In the extended 1990 version I read, this leads to a brilliantly funny back-and-forth between the two authors, played out through each edition of the book released between 1983 and 1990. Undoubtedly the best preface I’ve had the pleasure of reading, it is a wonderful indication of their great partnership – one that results in unstoppable giggling.

The book begins with a series of maps – one for each letter of the alphabet. At first it seems that they intend to show the locations of the place names featured in the book. But the more you turn pages, the more you see they are comically skewed, squashed and manipulated, reflecting some of the ridiculous diagrammatic representations of simple things we see on a daily basis. My personal favourite is P – a grid of one square wide by three tall, with coordinates A1, B1 and C1. In A1 is an image of the UK, B1 shows the whole planet, and C1 Australia. Place names starting with P are assigned grid coordinates.

The main part of the book is set out like a dictionary – alphabetically, with recognizable abbreviations describing the words. All the words are place names (mostly in the UK but some further afield) and have been assigned meanings that do not yet have a word. The meanings give a wonderful insight into every day life and personal experiences we don’t often discuss.

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I picked this up because it's the only book by Douglas Adams that I hadn't read. As "a dictionary of things there aren't any words for yet" it is great. You will find yourself laughing at a shared human experience, for example a Deventer- a decision that's very hard to make because so little depends on it. But it can be hard to read more than few pages at a time.

Dieses Wortbuch der bisher unbenannten Gegenstände und Gefühle ist im Heyne Verlag in einer zweisprachigen Ausgabe erschienen, die sowohl die gelungene Übersetzung plus Ergänzungen von Sven Böttcher enthält, als auch den Originaltext mit teils weiteren Wortbedeutungen, die sich auch beim besten Willen nicht adäquat übersetzen lassen. "Der tiefere Sinn des Labenz" ist allein schon von seiner wörterbuchartigen Machart her eher ungeeignet dafür, es an einem Stück durchzulesen. Es eignet sich viel mehr dafür, es irgendwo rumliegen zu lassen und immer mal wieder bei Gelegenheit eine Definition nachzuschlagen, nach der man gar nicht gesucht hat. Mein Favorit unter den, häufig seltsamen Ortsnamen entlehnten Worten ist unter anderem: "Hodenhagen, der - Ein Mann, der ziemlich eigenartige Vorstellungen von Romantik hat." // Lustige Lektüre für Zwischendurch, wenn auch bei Weitem nicht jeder Gag sitzt. Wer britische Albernheiten mag, macht hier aber garantiert nichts verkehrt!

If only there was a word to describe the type of goofy nonsense book that only Douglas Adams can get away with writing, because this book would fall into that category. Everything he writes is pure genius. Some of his definitions had me laughing out loud.

"Der Tiefere Sinn des Labenz" is the German translation of Douglas Adams' "The Deeper Meaning of Liff". It also contains the original. Quite funny indeed.

Weird and funny, just like all Douglas Adams stuff. But unlike other Douglas Adams stuff, this isn't a story. It's really more like an alt-dictionary. It's words he has made up, with the help of some collaboration, and given them meaning. Some of them are funny, and others I suspect WOULD be funny if I were English - he uses many English town names as words, which presumably makes more sense, the more you know about those towns. Having never been to England myself, my knowledge of the ins and outs of those towns is therefore limited.

So if you're an Adams completist like I am, you will want this, and it does scratch the Douglas Adams itch. But it is also decidedly hit and miss, at least for me.

Douglas Adams takes place names that he believes aren't being used anyway since no one ever goes to these places, and he repurposes them all, assigning them to experiences, sensations, items, and people we all wish there were names for.

Most of the definitions were merely absurd, but some of them were so perfectly on point in describing something that's happened to everyone that I really wanted to memorize the word and start using it in everyday vocabulary. Most definitions were quite brief, but some went on for a while on some hilarious tangent. My hometown of Tampa was redefined as "the sound of a rubber eraser coming to rest after dropping off a desk in a very quiet room." He gives the name "Trispen" to that stubborn blade of grass that actively hides while you're mowing the lawn, only to pop back up again after you've put the mower away. You are Heppling if you sculpt the contents of the sugar bowl. You are a Clune if you're one of those people who just won't leave. If you feel twinges in some parts of your body when you scratch other parts, those are Acklins. That "n" in the middle of "stop-'n'-go" abbreviations is called a Nacton. Occasionally he gives up on giving something a definition--the explanation for "Parrog" says "God knows. Could be some sort of bird, I suppose."

With the silly maps at the beginning as well (some of which are just impractical and inaccurate and some of which are actually bizarre), the whole thing is just a romp through absurdity. If you read this with friends around, you'll be wanting to read every entry to them.

This book is full of rather witty reassignments for place names that aren't being used for much anyway. How often have all of us wished there was a good word to describe a thing, a phenomenon, or a feeling? Isn't the world a better place now that we have Douglas Adams's answer to this puzzling problem? Isn't it nice to know that a grimsby is a lump of gristle that is either in your food through careless cooking or sometimes placed there deliberately by Freemasons? Or that a sidcup is one of those hats you make out of a handkerchief with the corners tied in knots? I don't know about you, but I'm glad to know that someone has done this . . . and on top of that, it's roaringly funny sometimes, prompting a reader to bookmark favorite words and read them out loud to similarly-minded friends. It's got that very typical English "scent" to its language, as well, and the maps in the beginning that get sillier and sillier as you go on are priceless.

great to dip into from time to time for small doses of Adam's genious

Hilarious, a must for all Douglas Adams fans.

Does the sensation of Tingrith(1) make you yelp? Do you bend sympathetically when you see someone Ahenny(2)? Can you deal with a Naugatuck(3) without causing a Toronto(4)? Will you suffer from Kettering(5) this summer? Probably. You are almost certainly familiar with all these experiences but just didn’t know that there are words for them. Well, in fact, there aren’t—or rather there weren’t, until Douglas Adams and John Lloyd decided to plug these egregious linguistic lacunae(6). They quickly realized that just as there are an awful lot of experiences that no one has a name for, so there are an awful lot of names for places you will never need to go to. What a waste. As responsible citizens of a small and crowded world, we must all learn the virtues of recycling(7) and put old, worn-out but still serviceable names to exciting, vibrant, new uses. This is the book that does that for you: The Deeper Meaning of Liff—a whole new solution to the problem of Great Wakering(8)1—The feeling of aluminum foil against your fillings.2—The way people stand when examining other people’s bookshelves.3—A plastic packet containing shampoo, mustard, etc., which is impossible to open except by biting off the corners.4—Generic term for anything that comes out in a gush, despite all your efforts to let it out carefully, e.g., flour into a white sauce, ketchup onto fish, a dog into the yard, and another naughty meaning that we can’t put on the cover.5—The marks left on your bottom and thighs after you’ve been sitting sunbathing in a wicker chair.6—God knows what this means7—For instance, some of this book was first published in Britain twenty-six years ago.8—Look it up yourself.