the.com/back forty
The farthest acres from the house, where fences loosen and rules get negotiable.
means A remote, out-of-the-way piece of land (or by extension, any far-off, low-scrutiny corner of life) distant enough from the main house that nobody's watching too closely.
from Comes straight from American land surveying: under the old quarter-section system, a 160-acre farm was commonly divided into quarters of forty acres each, and the 'back forty' was the parcel farthest from the farmhouse and road — the rough, untended ground out past the fields you actually tended. It entered everyday speech as a jokey stand-in for 'way out there, off the beaten path,' with no single coiner — just generations of farm talk drifting into general use.
- origin
- from 40-acre land survey plots, US homesteading
- usage
- often not literally forty acres
- connotation
- implies remote, unsupervised, slightly lawless territory
- modern use
- metaphor for any neglected far corner