Word: cesspool
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...word itself conjures up images of things fecal. A floater—an upperclassman unable to form a rooming group who is then randomly assigned a room and bunkmate for the following semester—is a lowly untouchable, a creepy loner left to bob about in a cesspool of social rejects and awkward bedfellows...
After the waterway was carved out of wetlands in the 1860s, oil refineries, tanneries and chemical plants moved in and spewed noxious waste into the canal, where it mixed with raw sewage. Before long, Gowanus was a cesspool. Today the surface can appear brown, green, black and sometimes purple, earning the canal the moniker Lavender Lake. Neighborhood residents whisper that the bottom is littered with bodies dumped there by the Mafia. (See pictures of New York City...
...good news is that when students finally do return to campuses, cleaning crews will have scrubbed the buildings clean. "The officials say they have scrubbed down the school, which is great because I think schools are a cesspool of germs anyway," Wahl blogged. "I'm curious if the school has put soap back in the bathrooms? Officials took it out of the bathrooms because kids would wreak havoc with it making huge messes. But, my lord, shouldn't it be back in the bathrooms...
...seasonal or casual work on offer meant few could afford comfortable places to live, though; landlords, well aware of the fact, threw up cheap housing without toilets, bathrooms and oftentimes drinking water. The over-crowding and disease appalled visitors. Behind one row of houses, Charles Dickens noted "a cesspool, bubbling and seething with the constant rise of the foul products of decomposition." The grubby, "consumptive-looking ducks" swimming upon it, he wrote in 1857, resembled "the human dwellers in fould alleys as to their depressed and haggard physiognomy...
...short walk from the site of the one-time cesspool, Lewis Calado's well-kept home, with its bushy pot plants and white flowering tree out front, stands out on a grotty housing estate littered with boarded-up properties. Life on the estate has improved in recent years, he says - still sporting the luminous vest from one of the two truck driving jobs he holds down to meet his mortgage payments - although petty crime remains a blight. The windows of his neighbor's new car were smashed recently. "You can't leave anything inside," Calado says. "Even...