Sophisticated and with polished manners.

*Urbane*'s synonyms include *suave, debonair,* and especially *cosmopolitan*. *Urbanity* was a trait of such classic movie stars as Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, William Powell, Leslie Howard, Charles Boyer, and George Sanders. (Notice that, for some reason, *urbane* is almost always used to describe men rather than women.) Teenagers in the 1960s read James Bond novels and watched his character onscreen to get tips about acquiring an urbane identity. But it's hard to acquire urbanity without actually having had wide social experience in sophisticated cities. And, since times have changed, the whole notion doesn't seem to attract young people quite the way it used to.

With its prefix *ex-,* (“outside of,” the noun *exurb* was coined around 1955 to describe the ring of well-off communities beyond the suburbs that were becoming commuter towns for an urban area. Most exurbs were probably quiet little towns before being discovered by young city dwellers with good incomes looking for a pleasant place to raise their children. Planners, advertisers, and political strategists today often talk about such topics as exurban development, exurban trends, exurban migration, and exurban voters.

Going between or connecting cities or towns.

*Interurban* is generally used to describe transportation. As a noun (as in “In those days you could take the interurban from Seattle to Tacoma”), *interurban* has meant a fairly heavy but fast electric train, something between an urban trolley and a full-fledged long-distance train, that offers more frequent service than an ordinary railway. Interurban transit today may include bus, ferry, and limousine—and, in a few lucky areas, a regional railway. With oil supplies dwindling, there's hope that interurban railways will be coming back into wider use.

The word *urbanization* started appearing in print way back in the 1880s, which says something about the growth of American cities. The expansion of Los Angeles was an early example of uncontrolled urbanization. Urbanization is often seen as a negative trend, with bad effects on quality of life and the environment. But apartments require much less heat than houses, and commuting by mass transit rather than cars can reduce pollution and energy use, and cities offer improved opportunities for jobs (and often for education and housing as well), so city growth doesn't make everyone unhappy.

(1) Modification of the culture of an individual, group, or people by adapting to or borrowing traits from another culture. (2) The process by which a human being acquires the culture of a particular society from infancy.

Whenever people come in close contact with a population that's more powerful, they're generally forced to *acculturate* in order to survive. Learning a new language is usually part of the acculturation process, which may also include adopting new clothing, a new diet, new occupations, and even a new religion. An older generation often fails to acculturate thoroughly, but their children often pick up the new ways quickly.

Dealing with or offering comparison between two or more different cultures or cultural areas.

If you've ever traveled in a foreign country, you've found yourself making some cross-cultural comparisons: Why are huge family dinners so much more common in Italy than back home? Why do Mexican teenagers seem to play with their little relatives so much more than teenagers in the U.S.? Cross-cultural analysis has produced extremely interesting data about such things as the effects of various nations' diets on their populations' health. Though *cross-cultural* was originally used by anthropologists to refer to research comparing aspects of different cultures, it's also often used to describe the reality that lots of us face daily while simply walking the streets of a big American city.

The science and art of growing fruits, vegetables, flowers, or ornamental plants.

*Hortus* is Latin for “garden,” and the first gardens were planted about 10,000 years ago in what is often called the Fertile Crescent—the crescent-shaped area stretching from Israel north through Syria and down Iraq's two great rivers to the Persian Gulf. Probably more fertile in previous centuries than it is today, it was the original home of such food plants as wheat, barley, peas, and lentils or their ancient ancestors (not to mention the ancestors of cows, pigs, sheep, and goats as well). Many *horticulturists* today work as researchers or plant breeders or tend orchards and greenhouses—but most American households contain at least one amateur horticulturist.

A group whose beliefs and behaviors are different from the main groups within a culture or society.

This common meaning of *subculture* (it has an older biological meaning) only appeared in the 1930s, and for about 20 years it was used mostly by sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists. But in the 1950s, as America's wealth led to more and more teenagers getting their own cars and thus their independence, not to mention the arrival of rock 'n' roll, people noticed something unusual happening among young people, and began to speak of the “youth subculture.” As the country's wealth and freedom of movement continued to increase, we realized that the U.S. had become home to a large number of subcultures. Today the Web makes possible more than anyone could have dreamed of back in the 1950s. When we happen to stumble on a subculture—bodybuilders, Trekkies, hackers, Airstreamers, anime lovers, motocross enthusiasts—we may realize with astonishment that we had never even imagined that it might exist.