'Podunk'
Akin to "flyover states," "nowheresville" and "hicksville," people use "Podunk" as a stand-in for anywhere they think doesn't have much going on. A common implication of Podunk is that it's a place so dreary and remote that it's not even worth situating on a map. One of the most famous people to refer to Podunk was Mark Twain, who in 1869 wrote that a certain fact was known even "in Podunk, wherever that may be."
But there are a couple of things that people who use the term probably don't know. First, Podunk is the name of a few real towns. There's a Podunk in Connecticut, one in New York, Vermont, Massachusetts. The Connecticut Podunk is well-known for an annual bluegrass festival.
The other thing people likely don't know? Podunk is an Algonquian word. Algonquian languages are a family of indigenous languages spoken from New England to Saskatchewan to the Great Plains. Those languages include Cree, Ojibwa, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Mi’kmaq (Micmac), Arapaho, and Fox-Sauk-Kickapoo. Algonquian tribes of the New England area include Mohegan, Pequot, Narragansett, Wampanoag, Massachusett, Nipmuc, Pennacook, Abenaki, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy. Chippewa, Ottawa, Pottawatomie, and a variety of Cree. There are a bunch of words in English that have Algonquian roots: skunk, moose, caribou. But beyond its Algonquian roots, much of the linguistic history of Podunk is kind of murky.
Ives Goddard, senior linguist emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution and a leading expert on Algonquian languages says "The most plausible being from the Nipmuc Indian Association of Connecticut's quarterly newsletter: "Podunk or Pautunke, means 'where you sink in mire', a boggy place. But the Native Americans called the town Nowashe, 'between' rivers."
lengthy article at:
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/09/20/411502703/some-podunk-town-in-the-middle-of-nowhere
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