I expect that a good many of you will be familiar with the Douglas Adams & John Lloyd 1983 book The Meaning of Liff - which took the "thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places." and applied them to "common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist."
I bought it at the time, devoured it and incorporated many of the words into everyday use from then on. Forty years on, a few of them are still in my routine vocabulary: my dad suffered from lifelong peoria, I unexpectedly gained a friend as a result of fitting a gweek to my car, and have aboyned more than one expert over the years for example.
Yesterday, on holiday with some friends, one of them - also a fan of the book - discovered a scullet hidden in the drainer. Except it wasn't quite a scullet since that is the last teaspoon in the washing up and this was in the drainer. That prompted me to look for the placename Scullet on Google maps, with the idea of using somewhere nearby as the more accurate term for this.
Google maps couldn't find Scullet though. That shook me a little.
The map for the 'S' section in the original book is not particularly helpful, as you can see.
I have subsequently searched for scullet using Google, DDG, Qwant and a couple of others. I can find haircuts (spelt with a 'k') and surnames (apparently of Romanian origin), but the only placename that comes close is Scullet Drive, between Cooloola Cove and Tin Can Bay in Queensland, Australia. That is clearly not the one indicated in the book.
Not every name applied to a place appears in online searches however. I have seen an C18th document in the local records office, for example, recording some field names that were used then and are still in use by some local landowners now, but which I have never found in online searches.
Clearly the majority of the placenames in The Meaning of Liff are genuine. I have always taken without question that they all are. There is enough disinformation and falsity in the world today without finding out that a foundational text from my youth was contributing to it all along.
So, is Scullet a genuine placename in the UK or Ireland that for some reason doesn't appear in online searches OR have Douglas Adams and John Lloyd been lying to us all this time? I am very unwilling to accept that.
