Oh do I ever love PD James.I've read all her books and some of them twice.I guess I've grown up with the term cottage because it was used in fairy tales a lot and the pictures always showed it to be a little house tucked in the woods,with lots of flowers around it.The English cottages I really liked when we were there were usually small,made of beautiful weathered stone and dripped charm with all the greenery.There is even a magazine out on the stands here called Cottage living,or something like that. I think a lot of us would love a small cottage somewhere.A squat as far as I know is just an abandoned building where people go to live if they don't want to pay any rent. Sometimes they get evicted and some times they don't. ( I Googled this) I'll bet Sara could clear this one up. So which James book are you reading?

Sometimes, language can be confusing.

We have a neighbor from England that planted a cottage garden in her front yard, full of flowers, roses and herbs. Our houses are not cottages (small houses) by any means,but she managed to bring a memory from her homeland and plant it here in Silicon Valley.

There is a new housing development going up on the last piece of farm land in our neighborhood. Some of the plots have room for a Casita (small house)next to the main house. There is a main room, and a bathroom. There is a small area in the main room with a counter, some drawers, a built in wine chiller, but no sink nor a stove. I fully expected a Casita to be fully functional as a small house, but the real estate agent said the zoning code prevented them from including these items.

Housing terms are confusing a lot of times. I live in a manufactured home on a permanent foundation, I call it my "not so mobile" home, there are some that call it a trailer and some call it a house. There are times I call it a shack, but whatever it's called, I am comfortable and it is small enough I can keep it up and have time for gardening or writing or reading and it is not going to go anywhere.

To me a cottage is a small house, equivalent to one of the earlier Cape Cod houses but with equally slanted roof, a live-in kitchen, a small parlor and bedroom downstairs and a room under the roof. Of course it has to have a cellar and a flower(cottage)garden in the front and a kitchen garden in the rear and flower boxes at the window. The walls are all stone, sometimes stuccoed and whitewashed.
It has a tile or slate roof. Houses of this type you find all over Europe.
A squat is a empty house or apartment which is used by mostly indigent people as lodging for what ever times they can live there (squatters).

Reading "The Murder Room". Thanks all for the definitions.

Just google the word and you can get definitions of all sorts of words. I realazied I tend to use a lot of out-of-date slang when I see blank looks in the younger generation's eyes. The latest was Phooey. A comoon expression used by Nero Wolfe mysteries.

I enjoy reading Nigel Colburn's blog Silvertreedaze, He is a curmudgeon of a british gardener/writer and always has all these british expressions that are so, well, expressive.

I was just sure Sheila or Sara would clear it up. Hm.

I use phooey all the time. Makes older people laugh.

A Squat might be what we would call a "flat" like a one or two room apartment.