'hood

[JAMES A. LANDAU Netscape. Just the Net You Need.]

There was a black man who was assigned to our office for a week to upgrade our network.

His first day he decided he wanted fast food for lunch, so he got into his car and asked his GPS for the nearest Burger King, which is right up Black Horse Pike.
Unfortunately (and probably to avoid a left turn across Black Horse Pike), his GPS routed him on a back road.  When less than a quarter mile from the Burger King, he decided he didn't like the looks of the neighborhood he was in, so he turned around and drove to a MacDonalds that was five miles in the other direction down the Black Horse Pike.

What he said was "it looked right a bad 'hood".

I may have gotten the idea from Tyler Perry's movie "Daddy's Little Girls", but I thought " 'hood" was, to a black man, a word connoting safety and companionship.  Therefore "a bad 'hood" struck me as a strange oxymoron.

Anyone help me out?


           James A. Landau
           test engineer
           Northrop-Grumman Information Technology
           8025 Black Horse Pike, Suite 300
           West Atlantic City NJ 08232 USA
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