24/12/92

Liff in the Ible Lane

THE DEEPER MEANING OF LIFF: A Dictionary of Things That There Aren't Any Words for Yet by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd. London, Pan / Faber & Faber. 146 pp. 4.99

Life has its anvils and safety pins and lint and walnuts. Fobs and nibs and nobs and fibs. Thises and thats, every you-name-it from zwiebacks to beeswax, but not absolutely, utterly everything. The rest is liff.
    I could never find "liff" in any dictionary - maybe I was looking in the wrong places - but then I happened across it in The Deeper Meaning of Liff, which had the sense to list its entries alphabetically. "Liff," it states, "is a common object or experience for which no word yet exists."
    If life is a bowl of cherries, then liff might be the last cherry in the bowl left uneaten by guests too polite to snatch the last one.
    To know what "cat" means, or "the," or how to spell "a," Webster and Oxford and Chamber and Funk & Wagnall have all the answers, but they can't tell you the first thing about a pluvigner (the tiny hole in the side of a ballpoint pen), a babworth (something that justifies having a really good cry) or the ever-useful ulting (clicking your jaw to unpop your ears).
    Maybe some day, standard, stuffy lexicography will accept these wonderful inventions. It is inevitable, I'm certain, because the English language has no future without them.
    Samuel Johnson must have been out to lunch when it came time to create a word for the kind of person who offers to help after all the work has been done (an ozark), or the noise made by a sunburned thigh leaving a plastic chair (skibbereen), or the lovely, poetic term for the cleavage in a workman's bottom that peeks above the top of his trousers (ravenna).
    Just think of how history might have been different if only we had had the correct words at hand. Like at Masada. All the Jews needed was a sign at the bottom saying, "No clunes" (people who just won't go away). Imagine if Alexander Graham Bell had been ible (clever but lazy). If Einstein had erred by a pleven (one more, or one less, than the number required), we'd be wondering what E=mc3 means.
    What if Neville Chamberlain hadn't hoffed (hoff: to deny indignantly something which is palpably true)? What if Stalin had been preborn a hobarris (a sperm which carries a high risk of becoming a bank manager)? Imagine our region if either Sadat or Begin had a staplow (a telephone number that you can't find anywhere because you once swore you would never speak to the person again).
    Yes, the mind thrupps.
    If you've got this book performing a slow rot next to your toilet, you'll recognize the riponing effect here (ripon: to include all the best jokes from the book in a review to make it look as if the critic thought of them). But as authors Adams and Lloyd will tell you, liff is what you make it.