They were living under the Jones Falls Expressway in the back of the Sun building, a couple of dozen homeless people with improvised shelters of tarpaulin and scrap materials. City officials forced them to move, providing temporary housing for those willing to accept it. The articles in The Sun referred to their encampment as a shantytown.

That is almost certainly an exaggeration. A shanty, by traditional definition, is a crude dwelling, a cabin, a hut, a hovel. And a shantytown, says the Oxford English Dictionary, is a “suburb consisting of shanties” or “a poor or depressed area of a city or town.”

When we think of shantytowns, we typically summon up images of those vast, permanent or semi-permanent tracts of improvised housing — canvas, plastic, scrap wood, scrap metal — found on the outskirts of the cities of Brazil or India, home to hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands.

In this country, when we think of shantytowns, we may recall the Hoovervilles in which the unemployed of the Great Depression lived. One such Hooverville on the Anacostia Flats in Washington housed about 15,000 Bonus Marchers in the spring and summer of 1932, until they were expelled by troops under the command of George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur. (Not the nation’s finest hour.)

By a stretch, one might call the long-standing encampment of the homeless on the grounds of St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Church at the foot of the Jones Falls Expressway — “Bum Park” in local parlance — a shantytown, but it is hard to see how those two dozen unfortunates across the street could be considered to constitute such a settlement.