>Well, thanks for coming clean.
>
>The number of people living in suburbs in the US has exceeded that
>living in cities since 1970 (US Department of Commerce, Social and
>Economic Statistics Administration, Bureau of the Census, Statistical
>Abstract of the United States, 1974, p 17).
>
>By my reckoning that means a considerable section of the US working
>class lives in so-called 'suburbs'. People in Britain are pretty snotty
>about the suburbanites, too. In Hampstead they are very arch about
>people from Essex and their 'Estuary English', mock-Georgian front oors
>and so on.
Maybe I should be more cautious in using American slang in a cosmopolitan environment. Yes, most Americans live in "suburbs," and most of what we call urban here would look pretty suburban to Europeans or Asians. I'm talking about the (mostly white) upper middle class that wants to seal itself off from people not like them, fearful of the dark-skinned, the noisy, and random social encounters that might force them to confront people not like themselves. The SUV is the vehicular counterpart of the geographical insulation that suburbia offers.
Doug