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.

From Pan Promotion News 54,
OCTOBER 1983

My Nose

My mother has a long nose and my father had a wide one, and I got both of them combined. It’s large. The only person I ever knew with a nose substantially larger than mine was a master at my prep school who also had tiny little eyes and hardly any chin and was ludicrously thin. He resembled a cross between a flamingo and an old-fashioned farming implement and walked rather unsteadily in crosswinds. He also hid a great deal.

I wanted to hide, too. As a boy, I was teased unmercifully about my nose for years until one day I happened to catch sight of my profile in a pair of angled mirrors and had to admit that it was actually pretty funny. From that moment, people stopped teasing me about my nose and instead started to tease me unmercifully about the fact that I said words like “actually,” which is something that has never let up to this day.