The Deepest Meaning of Liff?

Mark Honeychurch - 16^th March 2026

A while ago a work colleague told me that she had a strange connection with a friend of hers, where they had been talking late into the night and found out that both of them would sometimes wake up just before their alarm goes off in the morning, especially if there’s something important happening that morning. When I told her that I also have this ability, she was surprised - there were three people all with the same unusual ability. At this point I let her know that this, like many of the quirky things in her life, is likely to not actually be very rare at all - it’s just that we don’t often talk about these odd everyday things that happen to us.

In reality, many people have the ability to wake up just before their alarm goes off. Similarly, I bet that rehearsing future conversations with people in your head (and then worrying about it sounding natural when you say it out loud) is a thing that most people do. And having a favourite mug or bowl at home or at work, and quietly being annoyed when anyone else uses it, is probably fairly common as well - or maybe it’s just me!

Tim, a regular at our Wellington Skeptics in the Pub meeting, once paid for a fortune teller to read his future when he was on holiday in India. One of the obscure, interesting “facts” that he was told by the fortune teller was that he has a mole on the side of your penis - how could the fortune teller possibly know this? When Tim compared notes with his boyfriend, it turned out that both of them had been told that they had a mole on their penis. Then a third visitor to the same fortune teller also confirmed that they had been told that they have a mole in the same place. It turns out that, far from being able to discern people’s anatomy, this scammer had figured out that a lot of people have a mole somewhere on their penis, and that if he just told all men this line, many of them would later check and be amazed to find a mole. When Tim told me this in the pub, I immediately went to the bathroom and checked - sure enough, there it was, right on the side of my penis.

I guess that these unspoken quirks are a type of Barnum Statement, and they can be used, like other Barnum statements, to manipulate people - they could conceivably convince people that in some magical way we know all about the odd things in their lives, things that they’ve never spoken to anyone about. Maybe we’re reading their minds, talking to their dead relatives, or have a “special bond” with them.

There’s a great source of these unspoken quirks that I read as a teenager, back in the early ’90s. The Meaning of Liff (and its extended edition, the Deeper Meaning of Liff) is a book in which Douglas Adams and John Lloyd matched British place names, most of them obscure and little-known, to many of the quirks and oddities that most of us experience, but we rarely talk about.

Here are just a few examples from the book:

• Acklins (pl. n.): The odd twinges you get in parts of your body when you scratch other parts.
• Ampus (n.): A lurid bruise which you can’t remember getting.
• Brindle (vb.): To remember suddenly where it is you’re meant to be going after you’ve already been driving for ten minutes.
• Fiunary (n.): The safe place you put something and forget where it was.
• Fritham (n.): A paragraph that you get stuck on in a book. The more you read it, the less it means to you.
• Kelling (ptcpl. vb.): The action of looking for something all over again in the places you’ve already looked.
• Kettleness (adj.): The quality of not being able to pee while being watched.
• Plymouth (vb.): To relate an amusing story to someone without remembering that it was they who told it to you in the first place.
• Rhymney (n.): That part of a song lyric which you suddenly discover you’ve been mishearing for years.
• Scosthrop (vb.): To make vague opening or cutting movements with the hands when wandering about looking for a tin opener, scissors, etc., in the hope that this will help in some way.
• Stibbard (n.): The invisible brake pedal on the passenger’s side of the car.
• Sturry (n.): A token run. Pedestrians who have chosen to cross a road immediately in front of an approaching vehicle generally give a little wave and break into a sturry. This gives the impression of hurrying without having any practical effect on their speed whatsoever.
• Woking (ptcpl. vb.): Standing in the kitchen wondering what you came in here for.

In the age of ubiquitous technology, maybe there’s a need to update the Meaning of Liff with some tech-related weird phenomena that most of us experience in our day to day lives. I’ve thought of a few, but I’m sure there will be a lot more:

• Your short term memory is not very good - sometimes you think of something you need to look up on Google, but by the time you’ve opened a browser and clicked on the search box, you’ve forgotten what you were going to search for.
• Sometimes you feel your phone vibrate in your pocket, but when you check your pocket it’s not in there.
• After talking about something with friends, you start seeing lots of ads for that same thing on social media.
• You know you looked at a web page in the recent past, but for the life of you you can’t find it either by searching Google or looking through your browser’s History.
• Sometimes you sit down to watch a movie you’ve been looking forward to, but spend most of your time staring at your phone screen instead and end up missing most of the movie.
• You keep far too many tabs open at once in your browser, many of which you’ll never need to look at again.
• In the middle of your work day you click the button to update your Windows install and reboot your PC, making your computer unusable - even though you have important work that you need to do.
• You realise there was a typo in your email just after you click the Send button.