June 11th, 2023

Douglas Adams and the Meaning of Kentucky

When I was a kid I was a completist–if I really liked an author, I would work my way through their entire oeuvre until I either exhausted it or they delved so deeply into another genre (included the genre of being less good) that I couldn’t follow. I no longer read in this way for the most part, partly due to lack of time, partly because most books don’t need to be read in the context of an author’s whole career, but I admit it was kind of a nice way to read. Occasionally I still do it, and there are few authors I’m staying with publication by publication, so we are taking their careers together in real time.

One author I read in his totality when I was a kid is Douglas Adams. I imagine a lot of kids do this–he is just a captivating writer for a certain type of goofy imagination. He also died shortly after I ceased to be a child, so stays forever in the realm of nostalgia for me, even as I reread at least one of his books every few years. Back when I was a snap, I read all the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books, and then later the unfinished fragment in The Salmon of Doubt and later still the completely unnecessary “sixth book in the series by Eoin Colfer, And Another Thing, which was perfectly fine but so unlikely Adams’s voice as to cause a new wave of grief for Adams’s early death. I read the two Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency books, which are good too, and so was the recent BBC series that took no actual content from the books, just the character and general vibe. I read Last Chance to See, which was about endangered species and really quite profound. And I read The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff.

These two very silly books left me a bit cold, even though I doggedly slogged through them. They are dictionary books consisting of place names, repurposed as words with definitions, invented by Adams. His theory was that place names are “wasted” when they could be words with meanings, and so he made them into what they could be. The books are little dictionaries. There were a bunch of funny ones, a few I liked especially for being mildly dirty jokes, and one that actually joined my vocabulary as a word.

Shakespeare invented dozens of words, Dan Savage has created a few–but honestly, one is pretty good for to take hold and come to common use. It’s “kentucky”–definition, “to fit neatly in the exact space available. So if you have one inch of space left on the shelf and a book with a one inch spine needs to go in there, it will slide in “nice and kentucky.” Isn’t that…right? Adams did have an ear for such things.

Even Mark has started to use the word in every day conversation–and he’s not an Adams fan, to such an extent that when he turned 42 I had to explain the joke to him. He has since gone on to listen to the Stephen Fry audio book of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and enjoyed it very much. I was delighted and asked him if he’d read the other four, but Mark was good stopping at one. Mildly troubling to me, since the best book in the series to me is actually the fourth, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish (would love to know other people’s favourites!). There’s plenty of authors who have made a huge impression on me and whose work I think of regularly, but Adams is really up there. And kentucky really fills (exactly) a gap in the language.