Bumfuck, Egypt
- noun
- /bʌmˌfʌk ˈiːɡɪpt/
- Offensive
- After driving for hours, we finally arrived in Bumfuck, Egypt, and wondered how we ended up in such a remote place.
Examples
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We were stuck in Bumfuck, Egypt, with no way to get back to the city.
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Finding a decent restaurant in Bumfuck, Egypt, is nearly impossible.
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I woke up referring to the city as Bumfuck, Egypt, and I heard a voice in my head say Babylon.
Blog text (3)
Synonyms
A very far away empty place with nothing there
Antonyms
How Remote
Surface Forms
Morphology
Bumfuck, + Egypt
The idiomatic meaning 'a remote, insignificant place' cannot be predicted from the literal constituents: 'bumfuck' is a vulgar, nonstandard coinage with no transparent compositional semantics and 'Egypt' is simply a country name. Understanding this phrase requires sociolinguistic and cultural knowledge of English-language toponymic joking and vulgar intensifiers, so a B1 learner who merely knows the component words would not reliably infer the idiomatic locative meaning.
Etymology
Bumfuck, Egypt is a rude, joking name for a place very far away. By putting the crude word bumfuck next to a distant country like Egypt, the phrase makes the spot sound tiny and very remote, so people use it to mean 'a place very far from anywhere'.