10 June 2020
Boondocks is a relic of American colonialism. British English imported lots of words from its far-flung colonial possessions, but American colonial aspirations primarily produced words derived from Mexican Spanish or North American and Hawaiian indigenous languages. This one, however, is an exception.
In English, the boondocks are any remote and isolated place. The word comes from Tagalog, the language of the Philippines that is spoken by more people in that country than any other. It means mountain in that language. It made its way into English during the U.S. occupation of that island nation following the Spanish-American War. For several decades, the word was used almost exclusively by marines and soldiers, entering into the general discourse during the Vietnam War era.
The U.S. seized the Philippines from Spain in 1898, and from 1899–1902 fought and won an insurgency against Filipino resisters. During that war and in the occupation that followed many U.S. soldiers and marines were stationed on the islands. In 1905, as part of that occupation, a U.S. Army officer, W.E.W. MacKinlay wrote A Handbook and Grammar of the Tagalog Language, which documents the existence of the word:
The mountain. Ang bundok.
Of course, this is not an English language appearance, but it is the first step in the word’s entry into English.
Within five years, Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language had included an entry for the word:
|| bun-docˊ (bo͞on-dok´), n. Also bondoc. [Tag.] A mountain. Also, in colloq. English (usually pl., pronounced bŭn´do͝oks), the hills and woods in general; the wilds; any place at a distance from a center of population. Phil.I.
That dictionary clearly indicates that the word is a foreign one and not yet completely Anglicized, but notes it is used colloquially. Presumably, that means by soldiers.
In the 1920s and 30s, use of boondocks seems to have been largely confined to the Marine Corps. Prior to World War II, the Corps was quite small, numbering less than 20,000 marines for most of this period (compared to about 660,000 during WWII or 180,000 today). In contrast, the U.S. Army was about seven times larger. Such a small and cohesive organization, in which many of the career marines knew one another, would be just the place to foster a specialized vocabulary.
The earliest English-language citation I have found for boondocks is from the September 1927 issue of the Marine Corps’s Leatherneck magazine, in which a marine stationed in Nicaragua makes use of it:
By we, I mean the remainder of the 57th Company, 11th Regiment, Marines, and I’m writing this to tell you that though we may be situated away out here in the “Boondocks” of Nicaragua, we held up the good old traditional Fourth [of July].
The quotation marks around the word indicate that either the writer or magazine editors thought that much of their readership would not be familiar with the term, but they did not gloss it, indicating that it wasn’t all that strange. A few months later, the January issue of Leatherneck includes the word without quotation marks, again in reference to Nicaragua:
The enlisted men of the hospital corps are widely scattered, part of them here at the field hospital and the rest scattered throughout the Boondocks, following the bull carts with rations, patrols, etc.
The word remained largely within the province of the Marine Corps until the Vietnam War. What appearances the word has in print are in the context of the Marines. But after Vietnam, the word filters into general use. So, in 1985 Nicholas Pileggi could write the following in his book Wiseguy, which would inspire Martin Scorsese’s film Goodfellas:
Instead, Stanley and Tommy got so carried was with the ball buster that they killed the guy. They were so pissed that the guy wouldn’t listen to Jimmy, that lived in the boondocks of Jersey, and that they had to go all the way out there just to talk to him, they got themselves so worked up that they just couldn’t keep from killing him.
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