Green’s Dictionary of Slang

(US campus) worthless, insignificant; lost.

1968		Current Sl. II:3.
1971		L. Bangs in Psychotic Reactions (1988) 6: Last we heard he was trying to sing ‘Whole Lotta Love’ to a buncha sentimental old hashheads in some Podunk club.
1990		E. Ruggero 38 North Yankee 340: Haven’t you noticed a pattern developing with all these podunk towns?
2000		Gazette (Montreal) 17 Feb. 12/3: A ‘quiet, little, white-bread, podunk, white-trash, redneck town’.
2003		J. Lethem Fortress of Solitude 413: The guards were all Caucasian. Yet even here, podunk nowhere, everything was yo, yo, yo.
2013		nsfwcorp.com 8 May 🌐 [He] bought a newspaper in a podunk railroad town in North Texas called Quanah.
2016		BBC.com 6 Dec. 🌐 I [...] took a job working at a soap factory every day after school. This was in a podunk town in upstate New York: 200 people and only one channel on television.
2022		Twitter 28 May 🌐 [A] podunk town that currently has a population of 700.