The Meaning of Liff^* started life as an English exercise I had to do at school, which then got turned into a game fifteen years later by John Lloyd and myself. We were sitting with a few friends in a Greek taverna playing charades and drinking retsina all afternoon until we needed to find a game that didn’t require so much standing up.

It was simply this (it needed to be simple; the afternoon was too far advanced for complicated rules): someone would say the name of a town and somebody else would say what the word meant. You had to be there.

We rapidly discovered that there were an awful lot of experiences, ideas, and situations that everybody knew and recognized, but that never got properly identified simply because there wasn’t a word for them. They were all of the “Do you ever have the situation where ... ,” or “You know what feeling you get when ... ,” or “You know, I always thought it was just me ...” kind. All it needs is a word, and the thing is identified.

So, the vaguely uncomfortable feeling you got from sitting on a seat which is warm from somebody else’s bottom is just as real a feeling as the one you get when a rogue giant elephant charges out of the bush at you, but hitherto only the latter has actually had a word for it. Now they both have words. The first one is “shoeburyness,” and the second, of course, is “fear.”

We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts, and began to realize what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English Dictionary is. It simply doesn’t recognize huge wodges of human experience. Like, for instance, standing in the kitchen wondering what you went in there for. Everybody does it, but because there isn’t—or wasn’t—a word for it, everyone thinks it’s something that only they do and that they are therefore more stupid than other people. It is reassuring to realize that everybody is as stupid as you are and that all we are doing when we are standing in the kitchen wondering what we came in here for is “woking.”

Gradually, little stacks of index cards with these words on them started to grow in John Lloyd’s bottom drawer, and anybody who heard about them would add concepts of their own.

They first saw the light of day when John Lloyd was putting together the Not 1982 calendar, and was stuck for things to put on the bottoms of the pages (and also the tops and quite a few middles). He turned out the drawer, chose a dozen or so of the best new words, and inserted them in the book under the name Oxtail English Dictionary. This quickly turned out to be one of the most popular bits of Not 1982, and the success of the idea in this small scale suggested the possibility of a book devoted to it—and here it is: The Meaning of Liff, the product of a hard lifetime’s work studying and chronicling the behaviour of man.