wayback

wayback (plural waybacks)

1. (dated, informal) An area in the body of a car behind the rear seat, such as the back of a station wagon, storage well in a VW bug, etc.
   • 2005, C.J. Hribal, The Company Car: A Novel, →ISBN, page 4:

     Only, Mercury Villagers do not have waybacks. They have third seats, rear seats, or cargo areas, but not waybacks.

   • 2009, Gloria VanDemmeltraadt, Musing and Munching: A Memoir and Cookbook, →ISBN, page 43:

     Two hours into the trip we discovered that Paul suffered from carsickness. Luckily, the wayback was equipped with built-in bins alongside the walls.

   • 2010, Hugh Macmullan, Larke, El Capitan and the Theory of Everything, →ISBN, page 52:

     Jack preferred the wayback, where he could look out the zippered plastic rear window at where we'd been.

   • 2010, Jim McGavran, In the Shadow of the Bear: A Michigan Memoir, →ISBN:

     The suitcases and the playpen, the Frisbees and the Wiffle Balls are all packed in the wayback of the car; the snacks are on the floor of the front seat where Deje can dole them out to our hungry kids as we drive south towards Charlotte.

2. A very remote time or place.
   • 1955, New Zealand. Parliament, Parliamentary Debates. House of Representatives:

     Those who live in the “waybacks” should have better roads.

   • 1968, Ralph Herbert Brookes, Ian Hugh Kawharu, Administration in New Zealand's Multi-racial Society - Issue 13, page 76:

     Films and radio have penetrated to the waybacks of New Zealand and to the Pacific Islands.

   • 2009, Patrick Millikin, Phoenix Noir, →ISBN:

     For the first time since beginning his macabre descent into the wayback, Eddie had no compulsion to follow his past.

   • 2018 Winter, Carol Ann Davis, “Another Darkness”, in Southern Review, volume 54, number 1, page 121:

     ...another on the sell-by date in the wayback where a living one looks out at maple elm and ash

   • 2014, Homer Hickam, Crater Trueblood and the Lunar Rescue Company, →ISBN, page 1:

     There were also rumors of a lost love, a common Helium-3 miner who'd since disappeared somewhere in the wayback.

3. An uneducated person from a remote area.
   • 1893, Robert Blair Risk, Observed and Noted, page 400:

     I saw fat men or boys, lean, awkward, baldheaded, asthmatic, rheumatic, waybacks and the last editions of the nursery, blowing at that light, when along would come some stray, solemn detachment of the human telegraph line, give a puff, clasp Liberty abover her head and whirl off in the full confidence that in time he would elope with the whole female kindergarden.

   • 1895, Official Reports of the Debates of the House of Commons of the Dominion of Canada:

     The farmers are not the class of thickheads and mossbacks and waybacks which the Government imagine them to be.

   • 1913, Australasian Medical Gazette, page 239:

     Unfortunately those who worked so hard for the fund did not realise the real needs of the waybacks or indeed of some settlers who are not considered waybacks.

   • 1920, George Sargant, The Winding Track, page 20:

     That's the right place for 'er sort—with them waybacks, who don't go to no school, and don't know nothin'.

   • 1954, International Child Welfare Review - Volume 8, page 41:

     These "waybacks" are difficult people to deal with, success depending almost entirely on the sister's personality and her understanding of these mothers' background.

• wayback machine
• way way back

wayback (not comparable)

1. (poetic, nonstandard) Alternative form of way back
   • 1998 Winter, Ted Joans, “I, Too, at the Beginning”, in Discourse, volume 20, number 1, page 94:

     I wailed & wailed In coffee shops wayback when Especially on lucrative weekends

   • 2011, I.B. Wingfield, Sunday in the Body of the Garden of Tyme, →ISBN, page 277:

     Wayback, prime suspects in the knife-back night Shimmied the tower out on butch-house pike.

   • 2013, Kennard Gregg, Black Rose, →ISBN, page 28:

     I'ld be living in a great big palace And drinking my wine from an emerald studed chalice I'ld wear a crown made of silver and gold like it was wayback in time of old

• backway