Why this word is great
BORDERLAND — [Noun] A tract of land near a political boundary; also, an intermediate, indeterminate state or category. From border ("boundary, frontier") + land ("territory, ground"). Unlike "frontier," which denotes a sharp line or outermost limit, or "hinterland," which implies a remote, settled interior, a borderland is a zone of permeable adjacency. It is the scrubby field where radio signals bleed and languages blur, the bureaucratic purgatory of a lost visa application, the psychic terrain where waking thought dissolves into dream—a geography of perpetual transition defined not by a center, but by its muddy, fertile, and profoundly unresolved proximity to the other.