Sarcastic answer in response to a query about someone or something’s whereabouts:
“In Hekkifaino, Finland!”
I made that up myself.
When/how "Timbuctoo"~="Podunk"~="Nowheresville"~="Buttfuck, Idaho"; Other languages have sim. names?
Anyone have a clue about where “Podunk” or “Buttfuck” originated?
I wonder if the Georgia ones were coined by Union veterans of Sherman’s army.
Cecil’s column on Where is Podunk?
Thanks for the cite. I forgot about the expression “jerkwater town.” Soda jerk?
Note that Cecil’s column does not really answer the question.
I think Pétaouchnok is more similar to Timbuctoo (somewhere long away, and difficult to access to), especially since it vaguely sounds Russian. You could use it for some French village but also for some remote and unheard of foreign place. While Trifouillis-les-oies is always a french village in the middle of nowhere.
Clochemerle implies more. It has to be some village where things are going in a weird way, like in the novel. Indeed not much used these days.
The Afrikaans signifier for a bucolic rural town would be Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein, which is a real place.
Almost certainly meaning the micro-towns built along railways to provide little more than water refill for steam trains. They needed water more often than fuel, so the long-range railroads built water stops at short intervals (30-50 miles?) and tiny towns often grew around them.
Outer Boonie Land or Outer Fucking Boonie Land if in appropriate company.
An elderly gentleman friend of mine (he died a few years ago at 90+) used to say of remote places, “out where Christ lost his shoes.”
I recall a news item about the town - the mayor said they had given up trying to keep to highway sign up, it kept getting stolen.
Podunk I associate with backwoods; I suppose it’s better than Hooterville. I can’t believe that made it on TV (after leave It to Beaver). There’s always Dildo, Nfld, just around the bay from Come-By-Chance.
Timbuctoo I associate with exotic and remote. I always assumed that came from Beau Geste and similar French Foreign Legion movies - which romanticized being stuck in the middle of nowhere while fighting the savage hordes (who seemed to object to being conquered…)
Ronnie Barker: “I’m from the third world - Yorkshire.”
And as usual it’s the same in Swedish, Långtbortistan, but I don’t think I have seen it in any context other than Donald Duck. Donald also usually emigrate to Timbuktu when he really has made an arsehole of himself.
Outer Hickistan 
And how do you get from Blue Ball to Paradise? Intercourse.
By which he probably meant “west Texas”. 
I just remembered that Arthur C. Clarke’s claim of the British “Podunk” is Wigan. That dates from ca. 1960; any Brits care to comment?
I do enjoy telling people I live 20 miles outside of Podunk, though. And it’s truuuuue.
P.J. O’Rourke once wrote disparagingly about Trashkanistan.
I’m pretty sure, at least in college, we often referred to East Bumblefuck as they proverbial remote, hick, backwards-ass town. More derogatory than Timbuktu or Katmandu which had the implication of exoticism.
The proverbial town in Yiddish where only fools live is Chelm. Don’t know if it ever was real or when it dates from.
I’m blanking on the name of the (non-Yiddish) town/country where food falls from the sky.
Always heard it as Bumfuck, Egypt too. And I actually read once somewhere that there is such a place. Only spelled different. Something like Baumfouk, Egypt or something similar. Haven’t been able to find it since then but I do recall reading about it many years ago.
Balkan term for that kind of town is usually Vukojebina: Place Where Wolfs Actively Procreate. Or, if i can put it down more directly: Wolfuckington.