Word: squalore
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...husband and wife would like nothing more than to sell the house, gyp the spouse, and move out with the kids. The scene's immediacy--with the smell of frying ham drifting out to the audience as Ella starts breakfast--is gradually overwhelmed by an almost surrealistic sense of squalor...
During the following two years the three siblings lived inside refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines. Although they were no longer terrorized, they continued to sleep in the dirt and catch colds while less hardy escapes succumbed to the squalor and despair. Some refugees gobbled down food with a hunger that caused shrunken stomachs to burst. Lien watched one man groan and writhe after eating several bowlfuls of rice; he died that evening in his sleep, by his wife's side. According to Lien, he had simply become "too hungry...
...grand porch with no mansion attached, a Potemkin affair. The essence of snobbery is not real self-assurance but its opposite, a deep apprehension that the jungles of vulgarity are too close, that they will creep up and reclaim the soul and drag it back down into its native squalor, back to the Velveeta and the doubleknits. So the breed dresses for dinner and crooks pinkies and drinks Perrier with lime and practices sneering at all the encroaching riffraff that are really its own terrors of inadequacy. Snobbery is a grasping after little dignities, little validations and reassurances...
...Worse, battered children grow up predisposed to batter their own offspring. Sexually abused boys often become pedophiles and rapists, while sexually victimized girls, perennial targets, are likelier to become battered wives. Bruce Ritter, a Roman Catholic priest, runs a shelter for teen-age runaways and castoffs in the neon squalor of Manhattan's Times Square. "The girls who walk in off the streets with babies abuse them," Father Ritter says. "If a two-week-old baby is crying, the mother will slap the baby. We try to teach her not to do that...
This year's outbreak is the most severe in the U.S. since 1925, when 34 of 38 victims died. But it is comparable in name only to the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the 1300s. Spread by ship-borne rats and nurtured in urban filth and squalor, the plague killed an estimated 20 million people, roughly one-third of the Continent's population, in a terrifying 2½-year rampage. The disease has largely disappeared today because of improved sanitation, measures to control the rodents that carry it, and the use of antibiotics to combat the plague...