The book has ten chapters, numbered 0 through 9, which use the Dutch language in a humorous way. Chapters are interleaved, with all odd-numbered pages belonging to different chapters than the adjacent even-numbered pages. This confusion is intentional. The two sets of pages are printed in different fonts.
Chapter 0, titled "Programme and Constitution of Upperlandic" explains that "Upperlandic is Dutch on vacation. Upperlandic is Dutch without the awful utility generally attached to that language. Upperlandic words and sentences look like their Dutch counterparts at first glance. But then, Upperlandic is meant for the second glance."
Other chapters of the book include various forms of word play such as palindromes, spoonerisms, the shortest possible sentence to include all letters, the shortest and longest possible words (Dutch allows for word-chaining), chessboard poetry, anagrams, lengthy pieces of prose containing no vowel other than the e, or containing no "tall" letters as on a typewriter (e.g. oeain but not j or b), and so forth.
