Word: slum
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...airport, the story continued, by Wolfram Bossert and driven in a rickety Volkswagen down a potholed dirt road into a virtual slum. "My father's house," Rolf remembered, "was nothing more than a wooden hut." Inside, it was meanly furnished with a bed, a table, a few chairs and a closet. As he entered the house, Rolf recalled, "my father trembled with excitement. I saw that he had tears in his eyes...
...book Robert Ward has attempted to update a half-forgotten relic of the '30s: the proletarian novel, with its idealized workers and smokestack suburbs. Ward's contemporary laborers are not moved by Woody Guthrie's lyrics; they rock to Mick Jagger and Aretha Franklin. They are not Dead End slum dwellers; they are Viet Nam vets and night-school dropouts. Their collars may be blue, but their lives run in the black: sheepskin jackets and vacations at the beach...
...Nicaraguan government evidently feels that its military presence close to the Honduran frontier will be enough to contain the contras. But the Sandinistas do not seem to have a strategy for the domestic disenchantment that has begun to seep even into their own ranks. In Managua's Barrio Riguero slum, a stronghold of militance during the 1979 insurrection against former Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, a Sandinista activist named Maria says she remains faithful to the revolution's principles, but "life is getting harder." The main problem: "Basic necessities cost more and more, and some items are almost impossible to find...
With such rare exceptions, the current low intensity of the conflict may have reinforced the longing among Salvadorans for more permanent tranquillity. That yearning may have been the most significant element in the Christian Democrats' victory. As Francisco Chicas, a factory worker in the San Salvador slum of Mejicanos, put it, "There has been too much suffering in this country. Duarte at least has started to talk to the guerrillas. We need to support him so that he will feel confident...
...attractive" or "impressive." This is incorrect. In journalese, all homes are either modest or stately. When confronted with a truly ramshackle fixer-upper, knowing scribes will deflect attention to the surrounding area, describing the residence as "off the beaten track" or "in a developing area," that is, a slum. Distaste for the suburbs is conveyed by mentioning "trimmed lawns and neat flower beds," thus artfully suggesting both compulsiveness and a high level of intolerance for life in its hearty, untrimmed state...