I used to own a copy of The meaning of Liff. On the cover there was a large orange sticker which said This book will change your life When you looked at the meaning of the word Liff it said (approximately as this is from memory)
Liff:
Any book whose contents are belied by its cover, for example a book which has an orange sticker on the cover saying This book will change your life but which is actually about nonexistent words
I gave the book to an acquaintance and never saw it again. A few years later I bought another copy, a newer edition, but it didn't have the sticker on it. In the new edition the meaning of Liff had changed. Now it meant
Liff:
Any common experience for which there is not yet a word
I imagine that the cost of placing an orange sticker on the cover was too high for the publishers and they had changed the meaning to make the sticker redundant.

The book was written while the authors were on holiday. The holiday was supposed to be a working holiday during which they would thrash out an outline for one of the hitch-hiker sequels, but Douglas Adams didn't feel like working on the project. They had a road map of Britain with them and were inspired by some strange place names.

Although it has been many years since I have read the book a few of the names/definitions remain with me.

The sequel was called The Deeper Meaning of Liff.

In Life, there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations, and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no word exists.

On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places.

-- From the introduction by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd.

The words they use are all place names, a few of them familiar like Chicago, but mainly very obscure, and mostly from the British Isles. Not only do they describe all these situations and things we all know, but the name just sounds right for it. You think Yes, that should be what it's called.

I've seen people try to do imitations of this before, and get the principle quite wrong: e.g. defining a "clinton" as something to do with blow jobs. No no! The point is the word redefined is some inoffensive obscure place like Oodnadatta or Saskatoon, with no previous connexion to it.

A few of them are uninterestingly silly, but many do fill genuine needs. The fairy Fair Use allows the quoting of a few, as a taster. Here are some that I would find genuinely useful in everyday life, and indeed in liff.

The index is highly amusing too, though almost completely useless.

sideways would like me to add one:

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