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. The first one is ‘shoeburyness,’ and the second, of course, is ‘fear.’ Douglas Adams on the creation of The Meaning of Liff, originally published in the Pan Promotion News, October 1983. Reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time.
Tags: books douglas adams quotes the salmon of doubt shoeburyness | Nov 3, 2009