That’s it- how could I forget Fucking?
When/how "Timbuctoo"~="Podunk"~="Nowheresville"~="Buttfuck, Idaho"; Other languages have sim. names?
Which is funny because the OP asks about words like “the boonies” in other languages, “the boonies” means “boondock” which means “mountain” in tagalog.
I’ve never heard anyone else use this but my Grandma, I always assumed it was something she made up, she uses “Georgia” to describe something very far away (which is odd because it’s not that far from Chicago, all things considered): “I’m not going to go all over Georgia looking for some specific cereal you like, this one is close enough” etc. 
I thought it was East Armpit, NJ.
Okrainye means “the outskirts” in Russian. If you pair it with a place, it means the outskirts of that place, like a suburb or a semi-rural “edge of the city”. Used alone as a noun, it means “the boonies” or “the back 40.”
The nation, the Ukraine, is spelled differently but I believe the words are related. Of course the people who told me that were Russian. LOL.
ETA: there is an actual town of Hicksville, NY on Long Island.
I’ve been to Barraterria and The Village. (Not really towns, just developments)
Yes, but that’s just “boonies”. A city name similar to “East Bumfuck” in US English, in Russian would be (and I heard it used) “Moochosransk”.
Yes, okrainye does mean outskirts. Ukraine means something like “The Borderlands” in Russian, and the way they say “in Ukraine” reflects that (na Ukraine rather than v Ukraine; cf. v Frantsii = in France, v Germanii = in Germany); essentially this means “on the Borderlands” (of our country) rather than “in Borderland” (a separate country). After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, there was an attempt made for a while to use “v Ukraine”, like English speakers changing from “the Ukraine” to just “Ukraine”, but that’s since been abandoned.
Timbucktoo in the sense of an impossibly far-off, exotic place is represented in Russian by the former city of Tmutarakan on the Black Sea.
On preview: I can confirm Mukhosransk [lit. Flyshitville"] is the most commonly used term for “East Bumfuck”, along with other similarly colorful synonyms (Zazhopinsk, Ust-Pizdyusk - the morphology of Russian swearing is a linguistic goldmine!).
You know, I never thought about the name that way, and I’ve known the town/city all my life.
In Alaska, it’s called ‘Wasilla’. Seriously.
Also a Dickshooter Ridge. Named for an early settler named Dick Shooter.
No, really.
Yes, Aladdin was set in China.
No, Aladdin does not mean Chinese. The name is Arabic: علاء الدين ‘Alā’ al-Dīn, and it means ‘the height of the faith’. In the story, the evil sorcerer from the Maghrib pretends to be Aladdin’s uncle, which implies that Aladdin’s family was of Arab origin, if the sorcerer can pass for a blood relative of Aladdin. There were Arabs resident in China from the early Middle Ages on. The Maghrib was the western end of the known world, and southern China was the eastern end, so the traveling back and forth between them was the longest journey in the known world.
The story of Aladdin actually has no Arabic source in the Thousand and One Nights. It was added in 1710 by the French translator Galland, who heard it from some other source.
The origin of the name *Timbuktu *is the Berber phrase tin buqt, which means ‘of the far away’.
Back in the eighties, I remember finding out, via Cecil’s column, that I’d actually been to Podunk (in Massachusetts) many times to visit family. I was delighted.
Podunk was a real place in Connecticut, the area on the north bank of the Hockanum River; in the 17th century it was the home of the Podunk tribe of Indians. In the present day it corresponds to East Hartford and South Windsor in Hartford County. Podunk derives from a word for ‘marshy place’ in an Algonquian language.
Correct, and thanks for the other material as well. I have a different recollection but concede I haven’t worked with the Burton material in a couple of years.
Also correct on Podunk. I drive past the Podunk River sign fairly often and it makes me grin both for the obvious reasons and in recalling Cecil’s column about it. It makes me feel like a weary, accomplished traveler.
Exactly, Timbuktu is not like the others. Timbuktu was known for centuries in Europe as an exotic, very remote and somewhat legendary place, which was nonetheless very interesting. That’s why “Timbuktu” is used even in the modern day in many Western European languages to mean the most remote place possible. This BBC article explains the word well.
For the purpose of rural provincial, less cultured, somewhat boring and relatively remote villages, there are of course many words. In German there’s a clear regional pattern to this, shown in this map from a linguistic questionnaire. As you can see, in many areas this kind of remote village is almost always known by a certain name. The southern half of German language area has one favourite: In Austria and Bavaria they say “Hintertupfing”, in Southwestern Germany and in Switzerland “Hintertupfingen”. Northwestern Germans say “Pusemuckel” or “Posemuckel”, while of the many variants in Northeastern Germany, “Kleinkleckersdorf” is the most popular. I would also say that “Kaff” is a typical word for a boring small village, it doesn’t need to be particularly remote or anything like that.
In those South German words, the ending hints to the speaker’s own region. In Austria and Bavaria, lot of placenames end with “-ing”, while in Southwestern Germany the typical ending is “-ingen”. “Hinter” is simply behind (also human behind), and “tupfen” means, for example, to pat something, so with enough imagination the name could be interpreted as something like “bum-scratching”. Posemuckel is a real German name of some villages in today’s Poland, which apparently were remote enough for the term’s users in Western Germany. “Kleinkleckersdorf” I could translate as something like “village of little fiddling about”, i.e. a place where if anything ever happens, then very slowly.
In Finnish, the most common expression is “takahikiä” or “perähikiä”. Hikiä is a real village some 80 km north of Helsinki, whose name sound a bit like “sweaty”, appropriate for stereotypical simple rural folk. Of the prefixes, “taka” simply means behind, while “perä” can be behind, bottom or further. One other weird expression in Finnish is “huitsin nevada”, which can be used for this purpose, or more commonly to try to make someone go away as far as possible. The first part probably refers to Huittinen, which is a small and rural town in Western Finnland, and Nevada is, as anyone having read books about the Old West would know, also quite remote.
Try spelling it forwards first.
In diction and singing class you’re taught to pronounce “when” “hwen.”
I always thought of it as the second planet of the Timbuk
system.