Dear reader, have you ever found yourself in a situation but couldn’t find a proper word for it? Douglas Adams, great writer, deep thinker and genius mind found a perfect solution to this live issue. Having observed that there is a large number of “spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places”, he set out to find a new use for them.

“We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts, and began to realise what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English Dictionary is. It simply doesn’t recognise huge wodges of human experience,” wrote Adams. “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 realise 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’.”