It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport."

In the early 1990s Douglas Adams wrote a series of humorous travel-technology essays reflecting on modern life’s design failures and small absurdities. This line is one of his characteristic asides about the built environment: airports as emblematic, globally familiar spaces that are engineered for throughput, security, and signage rather than human comfort or beauty. The remark appears in Adams’s nonfiction writing from this period, where he uses mock-linguistic “evidence” (what idioms do or don’t exist) to make a comic point about shared aesthetic judgments in contemporary infrastructure.

Adams uses mock-scholarly phrasing (“It can hardly be a coincidence…”) to deliver a comic verdict on airports: they are so routinely ugly, stressful, and impersonal that no culture has ever adopted them as a standard of beauty. The joke works by inverting a familiar idiom (“as pretty as a picture”) and substituting a modern, utilitarian space associated with queues, noise, and fluorescent lighting. Beyond the punchline, it reflects a broader Adams theme: skepticism toward supposedly advanced modern systems that, in practice, make human life more tedious rather than more delightful.