G'day,

Back on 15 May 05 - 05:53 PM, sixtieschick wrote:

Inquiring minds might want to know: The term "boondock" comes from a remote mountain village in the Philippines called Bontoc. During WW II, some U.S. soldiers were sent there to fight the Japanese. They considered it the most far-flung, primitive area on the planet. The name got bastardized to "boondock" and then "the boondocks."

This worried me ... I'm not near my (home) Oxford - but some Googling tells me that the word appears in English language dictionaries from around 1909. It's directly from the Tagalog (Philipines) language bundok = mountain. It may be that when American troops encountered the mountain village "Bontoc" (which may well be cognate with the Tagalog word for "mountain" ... ) they engaged in a bit of "Folk Etymology".

(Co)-incidentally, some of the Google hits suggested that the Americans only started common use of the word in the Vietnam War era ... maybe that only means that American lexicographers only started to encounter it in "respectable" printed sources by the early '60s ...

Regard(les)s,

Bob