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If you call a place podunk, you mean it is small and not important — a quiet town in the middle of nowhere, the opposite of a big city. It is informal American English, a little teasing, and sometimes . People say a podunk town or some podunk college. You may also see Podunk with a capital P, as if it were the name of one particular tiny town. There were real places with names like this; by the late 1800s the word had come to mean any obscure little place, a use Mark Twain helped along. You would not put it in a careful essay unless you wanted that folksy, slightly mocking tone.
窮鄉僻壤的、無名小鎮的(美式口語,帶點瞧不起)
組成From an Eastern Algonquian word or words, likely Loup A. Similar names were given to various small, little-known places (scholars note a path like Potaecke → Potunke → Podunk). One idea links it to an adjective meaning “round”; another splits it as pot- (“to sink”) + -unk (a place-ending), comparing words for bog and sinking in mud. The exact breakdown is not settled. What is clear is the later English meaning: an obscure small town.
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法,原文照列,我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的;有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
Podunknoun/ˈpoʊdʌŋk/
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A member of a Native American people who spoke an Algonquian Quiripi language and lived primarily in modern-day Hartford County, Connecticut.
Podunkname/ˈpoʊdʌŋk/
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A mythical small town of no importance.
- They even know it in Podunk, wherever that may be.
- Podunk. A term applied to an imaginary place in burlesque writing or speaking.
podunkadj
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Small, rural, and unimportant.
- "'A Super Bowl win can legitimize us as a town. We're not some small podunk town anymore,'" said Spencer Venable of Indianapolis.
- Yes the beautiful time every year when this little podunk town [of Pendleton, Oregon] swells to four or five times her size with Round-Up feverish Cowboy types who chew, spit and chase four-legged critters around a screaming arena….check that….That’s normal…
資料來源:英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary(CC BY-SA 4.0)。 原文照列,未經改寫。