the meaning of 42

[_dante]

42 is the meaning of life.

in Japan you pronounce 42 the same way as death.

so if the idea that the meaning of life = 42 came from Japan, then the meaning of life is DEATH.

 

[Chicago Ted]

I'm pretty sure it was his age when his daughter was born.
Something like that.

I have a friend that said this too, you and he are the only ones i have heard say that.

OT: It's how may times you have to solve a Rubix Cube before it opens up and transports you to another dimension.

I'd be in another dimension by now if that were true.

 

[dantheman931]

42 in Japanese is shi-juu-ni, which doesn't mean anything other than 42 as far as I know. 4 can be pronounced shi, which does sound like the word for death, or it can be pronounced yon which (again) means nothing.

[/professor wiseass]

 

[_dante]

Really I thought that 42 was pronounced shi-ni and that was also how you pronounce death or die.

Sorry that I'm not very good at Japanese

 

[quiet_samurai]

I'm pretty sure it was his age when his daughter was born.
Something like that.

I have a friend that said this too, you and he are the only ones i have heard say that.

OT: It's how may times you have to solve a Rubix Cube before it opens up and transports you to another dimension.

I'd be in another dimension by now if that were true.

Yeah well, you didn't do it right then.

Fun Fact: You were the 42nd poster in thread.

 

[FurthestLocutus]

I was just watching that movie like 20 minutes ago
But i also read the first 2 books

 

[link141]

So how long do we have to guess for.

 

[SonicKoala]

I'm intrigued, but I also have a good feeling the OP is completely full of SHIT and he's just playing with everyone.

 

[Akai Shizuku]

The number of days until you tell us what it really is.

 

[KValentine]

What do you get when you multiply 6 by 9?

In base 13, of course.

 

[Daveman]

I'm pretty sure it was his age when his daughter was born.
Something like that.

pretty sure he was younger than that when he wrote the book.

I'm gonna guess, from what I read in his biography and after what I picked up in wikipedia. He always idolised monty python, that being the main reason for him going to cambridge (to join footlights as they had done) and, as I checked on wikipedia, he got his first role in monty pythons flying circus in episode 42 (although somebody ninja'd me on that). So I guess, in a way, his entire goal in life was that episode, but hey I never met him. [envy]

 

[IcedPain]

Ok I'll go with that something important happened on February 11. the 42nd day of a year

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

Well, it's been 2 and a half hours since he said "an hour or two".

 

[matsugawa]

6 x 9 = 42 in base-13 mathematics was another proposed solution, to which Douglas Adams replied, "I may be a sad case, but I don't make jokes in base-13."

According to a friend, 42 was arrived at, by committee of the radio show's cast and crew, as being the funniest number.

 

[niglett]

okay my answer is that 42 is not the answer its self but the first hint to the answer. in the book if you go to page 42 and count 42 lines from the beginning of the page you should end up on a line/ paragraph whose only words are "The Earth". this line could easily be removed and still hold the whole meaning literature wise. but 42 was picked because it has appeared in his life before and it sounded neat to him. so he purposely edited the pages 42 and 43 to place "the earth" in that spot. for those who have not read the whole series or don't remember the earth was designed by the second greatest supercomputer of all time, Deep Thought, to calculate the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe And Everything. Douglas told me that he wrote it like this because "you cant actually have an answer without a question because with out the question it is just a bunch of dingos kidneys."

so 42 = Earth = Question, which leads to actual answer.

 

[niglett]

Well, it's been 2 and a half hours since he said "an hour or two".

sorry I'm at work I'm on call.

 

[axia777]

Here is all the answers you will need.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy

And I quote:

The number 42

Douglas Adams was asked many times during his career why he chose the number 42. Many theories were proposed,[7] but he rejected them all. On November 3, 1993, he gave an answer[8] on alt.fan.douglas-adams:

? The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do.' I typed it out. End of story. ?

Adams described his choice as "A completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could, without any fear, introduce to your parents."[4]

While 42 was a number with no hidden meaning, Adams explained in more detail in an interview with Iain Johnstone of BBC Radio 4 (recorded in 1998 though never broadcast [9]) to celebrate the first radio broadcast's 20th anniversary. Having decided it should be a number, he tried to think what an "ordinary number" should be. He ruled out non-integers, then he remembered having worked as a "prop-borrower" for John Cleese on his Video Arts training videos.

Cleese needed a funny number for the punchline to a sketch involving a bank teller (himself) and a customer (Tim Brooke-Taylor). Adams believed that the number that Cleese came up with was 42 and he decided to use it.[10]

Adams also had written a sketch for The Burkiss Way called "42 Logical Positivism Avenue", broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 12 January 1977 [11] - 14 months before the Hitchhiker's Guide first broadcast "42" in fit the fourth, 29 March 1978.[4]

Burkiss Way, "Logical Positivism" sketch excerpt
Play sound
An excerpt from Douglas Adam's The Burkiss Way sketch, "Logical Positivism" excerpt
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

In January 2000, in response to a panelist's "Where does the number 42 come from?" on the radio show "Book Club" Adams explained that he was "on his way to work one morning, whilst still writing the scene, and was thinking about what the actual answer should be. He eventually decided that it should be something that made no sense whatsoever- a number, and a mundane one at that. And that is how he arrived at the number 42, completely at random."

Stephen Fry, a friend of Adams, claims that Adams told him "exactly why 42", and that the reason is[12] "fascinating, extraordinary and, when you think hard about it, completely obvious." However, Fry says that he has vowed not to tell anyone the secret, and that it must go with him to the grave. John Lloyd, Adams' collaborator on The Meaning of Liff and two Hitchhiker's fits, said that Douglas has called 42 "the funniest of the two-digit numbers."[13]

There is the persistent tale that forty-two is actually Adams' tribute to the indefatigable paperback book, and is really the average number of lines on an average page of an average paperback book.[14]

So to the OP, what the hell are you talking about? There is no meaning. There never was a meaning. Doug just wrote down 42 as a joke. That is all.

 

[NeutralDrow]

So to the OP, what the hell are you talking about? There is no meaning. There never was a meaning. Doug just wrote down 42 as a joke. That is all.

I was under the assumption that the OP was tricking people into giving meanings and laughing all the while. I hope I was right about that.

 

[niglett]

what you say is true but i was referring to the meaning in the book more than in reality