For the longest time I thought the Smithereens was a smattering of islands somewhere in the South Pacific. I searched for it on google maps just prior to posting this (in case it really was).
When/how "Timbuctoo"~="Podunk"~="Nowheresville"~="Buttfuck, Idaho"; Other languages have sim. names?
Which is where hellifinos live.
For that definition, in Spain we just go for the literal thing: “las antípodas” (the antipodes, the place on the exact opposite end of the world).
"My girlfriend is from Atlantic City and says “Japip.”
Sure you are spelling that right? 'Cos it’spronounced Jabip about 50 miles from AC.
For me, Bumfuck is generally in Egypt.
Nowhere’sville in Utah? AFAIK, every state has its own Nowheresville, likely several.
Never heard Timbuktoo used in connotation of jabip, Bumfuck or Nowheresville.
A few more, some of which have already been mentioned:
Well, you asked.
Thanks to all. The site cited above is terrific–it has stuff on all placeholders, eg doohickey, thingamajigs, widgets.
Leave us not forget Hell’s half-acre.
Where did you get this odd spelling from? Are you aware that the standard spelling is Timbuktu?
Maybe he went to school with Timothy Buck the second.
Russian for Timbuktu is Tmutarakan, which was an important place for a couple thousand years, controlling the strait east of Crimea leading from the Black Sea to the Azov and from there up the Don river to the “Varangian route” north or the “Khazar portage” to the Volga, Caspian, and points east. It was the Greek colony of Phanagoria but when the Byzantines were ousted by the Turkic-speaking Khazars, the viceroy there was called the Tamantar Khan “ruler of the crossing” from which came the name Tmutarakan when the Kievan Rus took the town. When Genoa and the Crimean Tatars were fighting for the area in the 14th century, the Tatars lobbed plague-infected corpses at the Italians during the siege of Caffa on the west side of the strait, and this was the vector by which the Black Death came to Europe. The result in the Crimea was that the entire area was depopulated, and the site of Tmutarakan became buried in blowing sand so that nobody could even figure out where it had been until it was rediscovered over 400 years later.
No. It’s a euphemism for Hell and it’s only used in the now rather obsolete expression Dra åt Häcklefjäll! = Go to Hell!
It’s a old Victorian/earlier-era spelling of the name; cf “Hindoostan” (Nowadays Hindustan) in India.
Yeah. What he said.
Actually, I was very sleepy. I post GQ queries the way other people get hypnagogic jerks,
That’s strange, I thought that Hawaii was the remotest.
Ironic that Timbuctu used to be the trade capital of the western world, and Hawaii is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations.
It’s true that a generic faraway foreign exotic place is often called in Finnish “missä pippuri kasvaa”; “where the pepper grows”, with similar meaning as Timbuktu. However, I’ve never heard this to be in form of “Pippurlandia”, which sounds more comical than anything else.
A local variation of “where the pepper grows” is common in some other European languages too.
Indeed it was (well, at least one of those), yet at the same time it also was very remote. Remember that before the colonization of Africa in the end of the 19th century, the way for Europeans to get to Timbuktu was with a camel caravan over the Sahara. In the Zagora oasis of southern Morocco there’s a well-known sign pointing towards the caravan route to the desert. It says: “Timbuktu, 52 days”. That’s how remote it was.
Secondly, the period of Timbuktu’s greatness was during the late Middle Ages of Europe. People would know it as an exotic marvellous city somewhere very far away. But in the early modern times of Europe, Timbuktu was already in decline, it wasn’t such an important trade center anymore. This contributed to its becoming legendary, since Europeans would be aware of a great city by that name, but they couldn’t be sure if it actually existed (anymore).
Regarding Podunks and Nowheresvilles, I was reminded of one passable saying. In Balkan, especially in Serbia, the nation of Montenegro is said to be a land “behind God’s back” (“zemlja Bogu za leđima” or something similar). This neighbor-degrading name has spread all over Balkan in different languages in a more general way to refer to a region of unimportant remote villages. And not restricted to Balkan states, it’s popular even in Finnish “Jumalan selän takana”.
However, that particular saying can have other meanings with very different connotations. In German, “Hinter Gottes Rücken” was used after the WWII to imply that the war had been fought “behind God’s back”, not referring to any particular land or location, but to the notion that the German soldiers had been fighting for all the wrong reasons.
In Swedish it’s only used the same way as Häcklefjäll, mentioned earlier in this thread, meaning “Get lost!”, “Go away!”.
When I was a child (in the US), a generic expression for some arbitrary remote area was “Kingdom Come”, which I eventually figured was probably from “…thy kingdom come…” in the Lord’s Prayer. The expression was frequently used to describe where someone had to park their car because there wasn’t anywhere to park close by.
La Conchinchina is also used in Spain’s Spanish to indicate a distant and exotic place, wonder why they specified Latin American. For rude distant locations:
- donde Cristo dio las tres voces (where Christ shouted three times),
- en el quinto coño (in the fifth cunt),
- en la quinta ostia (in the fifth Host),
- en la qunta leche (in the fifth milk; understood to be an euphemism for the two above).
But it’s also highly common to make up something on the spot. Extra points if it rhymes: donde Napoleón perdió su cochon (where Napoleon lost his pig, using the French word to make it rhyme).
One I’ve come across several times for a remote rural village in a Canadian context is Creeping Stubble, Saskatchewan.