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Unread 01-12-2018, 03:11 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: San Diego, CA, USA
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A verbal relic from the Trump family's slumlord days, no doubt. It's real estate slang for housing units of very poor quality. The term appears in that context in Maggie Smith's poem "Good Bones."

But there may be a specifically Long Island connection to Trump's familiarity with the term, as well. My father, who grew up in rural Iowa and Minnesota, used "shithole" to refer to a cesspit or cesshole beneath an outhouse/latrine. Astonishingly, though, most households in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, still use cesspools for waste drainage. Here's an article from November 13 on the subject.

Last edited by Julie Steiner; 01-12-2018 at 03:16 PM.
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