Thursday 15 February 2007

Liffs

The Meaning of Liff was a book written by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd in 1983. Liffs are things that have no word to describe them in the English language and are married to a place name from anywhere in the World. John Lloyd, also being the producer of QI, started a thread on the QI Forum all the way back in 2003. Since then, the thread has grown into the most hilarious thread on the forum.

Plenty of good examples from the forum include:

Noards
The bits of wall behind a radiator that never get painted.

Great Knowley
One whose sole contribution to society is watching repeats of Eggheads all day and being a pub know-all in the evening. The worst kind of smartarse.

Little Knowley
An eight-year-old Countdown champion. The second worst kind of smartarse.

Pirnmil
I small system of shafts and gears typically found within the engines and other apparatus of ocean liners built between 1940 and 1965.

Poughkeepsie
The person who initiates and then commentates upon another person's colonic irrigation.

You can read or contribute to more than 700 Liffs in this thread. Alternatively you could buy one of 3 books by John Lloyd and Douglas Adams here on amazon. You can also read the Liffs which will appear in every Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph here.

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