Graduation Day Dress Up, South Africa

Etymology
The origin of the word slum is thought to be the Irish phrase 'S lom é (pron. s'lum ae) meaning "it is a bleak or destitute place." An 1812 English dictionary defined slum to mean "a room". By the 1920s it had become a common slang expression in England, meaning either various taverns and eating houses, "loose talk" or gypsy language, or a room with "low going-ons". In Life in London Pierce Egan used the word in the context of the "back slums" of Holy Lane or St Giles. A footnote defined slum to mean "low, unfrequent parts of the town". Charles Dickens used the word slum in a similar way in 1840, writing "I mean to take a great, London, back-slum kind walk tonight". Slum began to be used to describe bad housing soon after and was used as alternative expression for rookeries. In 1850 Cardinal Wiseman described the area known as Devil's Acre in Westminster, London as follows:
"Close under the Abbey of Westminster there lie concealed labyrinths of lanes and courts, and alleys and slums, nests of ignorance, vice, depravity, and crime, as well as of squalor, wretchedness, and disease; whose atmosphere is typhus, whose ventilation is cholera; in which swarms of huge and almost countless population, nominally at least, Catholic; haunts of filth, which no sewage committee can reach - dark corners, which no lighting board can brighten."
This passage was widely quoted in the national press, leading to the popularisation of the word slum to describe bad housing.