Assorted Comments

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:20 PM -0700 5/22/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>I haven't googled, but Europe seems to accommodate slums as well:
>"The slums of London - Glasgow - Marseilles - Cadiz - Moscow - etc."
>Also Australia: "Yhe slums of Sydney."
>
>   So, everywhere but the U.S.
>
>   JL

Well, there are the slums of Beverly Hills, from the eponymous late
90's movie, but I imagine there's some irony involved there.

As far as slum = den, there's a louche quality to the latter (den of
iniquity, opium den) that I'm not sure was ever present in the former
(opium slum? slum of iniquity?).  "Slum" seems almost sociological
and hence to cry out for euphemism, while "den" seems almost biblical
(without even getting to the 'family room' of cub scout varieties of
the modern den, the latter presumably a metaphorical extension of the
animal abode).

LH

>
>Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU> wrote:
>   ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: Fred Shapiro
>Subject: Re: Assorted Comments
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>On Tue, 22 May 2007, Erik Hoover wrote:
>
>>  From news reports, the slums all seem to be in the major cities of
>>  Central and South America now.
>
>No, they're in Africa and Asia as well. "Slums of Nairobi," for example,
>gets 234 hits from the last two years in LexisNexis.
>
>Fred Shapiro
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Fred R. Shapiro Editor
>Associate Librarian for Collections and YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS
>Access and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press
>Yale Law School ISBN 0300107986
>e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu http://quotationdictionary.com
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
>
>
>---------------------------------
>Be a better Globetrotter. Get better travel answers from someone who knows.
>Yahoo! Answers - Check it out.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org