Boondocks song written and produced by Joe South. It tells the story of a young man who laments that people put him down because he was born in the boondocks. He is in love with the boss man's daughter and vows to work slavishly until, one day, he can "move from this old shack" and fit in with her society. Throughout the song, he asks that the "Lord have mercy on the boy from down in the boondocks". Boondocks The boondocks is an American expression that stems from the Tagalog word "bundók" ("mountain"). It originally referred to a remote rural area,
Austronesian languages can be shown to be descended from the same ancestral word in Proto-Austronesian according to regular rules. Some cognate sets are very stable. The word for "eye" in many Austronesian languages is mata (from the most northerly Austronesian languages, Formosan languages such as Bunun and Amis all the way south to Māori). Other words are harder to reconstruct. The word for "two" is also stable, in that it appears over the entire range of the Austronesian family, but the forms (e.g. Bunun dusa; Amis tusa; Māori rua) require some linguistic expertise to recognise. The Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database gives word