Bongo Bongo Land
- noun
- Slur
:
[término ofensivo y racista para un país]
- When bureaucracy piled up, she felt like she was living in Bongo Bongo Land.
Examples
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The committee dismissed the unusual proposal as something more suited to Bongo Bongo Land than reality.
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The story took us to Bongo Bongo Land where anything was possible.
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After getting lost in the jungle, the explorers joked they had stumbled into Bongo Bongo Land.
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Welcome to Bongo Bongo Land!
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After getting lost in the jungle, the explorers joked they had stumbled into Bongo Bongo Land.
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The committee dismissed the unusual proposal as something more suited to Bongo Bongo Land than reality.
-
When bureaucracy piled up, she felt like she was living in Bongo Bongo Land.
Synonyms
1
9.9
A funny name for a country or place with silly, illogical official rules
1
6.9
A place that exists only in stories or imagination
A place that exists only in the mind or in stories
A place that exists only in your mind, often in stories
Surface Forms
Morphology
Bongo + Bongo + land
The repeated element 'Bongo Bongo' is essentially a nonce or mock-name and gives no predictable lexical meaning even if a learner knows 'bongo' (e.g., the drum). While 'land' signals a place, it does not convey the ironic/pejorative sense of an imaginary or uncivilized country, so the overall meaning and connotations cannot be derived from the parts by a B1 learner.
Etymology
Bongo Bongo Land is a mocking, made-up place name that copies the sound of African bongo drums. People used it to suggest a faraway, strange, or 'uncivilized' place, so today it means an imaginary, often 'insulting' remote place.