Words

boonies, n.

AN EXPERT on satanic- ritual abuse, Debbie Nathan, recently said of the US television show The Jenny Jones Show (which was fined millions for inspiring murder) that people such as herself are beguiled into appearing on it as a way of alleviating their life in the boonies.

Not in the OED, it is a Fifties, Marine Corps abbreviation of boondocks, from the Philippines bundoc - mountains; hence any remote place, and in use as such at least half a century before the OED's 1944 citation; and boondockers - combat shoes - were used long before its 1953 example. Also not in the OED is the meaning, an outdoor lavatory. Perhaps it is as well that politicans do not substitute boonies in their parrot-cry of "we shall go and show what we think of all this in the shires".