You can think of small-town as pointing at a town you can walk across in twenty minutes: one main street, one paper, a doctor who knows your grandmother. Everything the word does grows out of that picture. Sometimes it points at the place — this paper, this clinic, this job is from there. Sometimes it points at the circle instead: a world with a visible edge, where new and unfamiliar things arrive slowly. The same picture, then, can be warm or can be an insult, depending on which part of it the speaker is using.
From the word’s history
The Wiktionary entry gives the make-up of the word as small + town.
來源資料把這個字拆成 small（小）+ town（鎮），也就是字面上的組合；今天的兩個用法都還看得見這個組合。
Wiktionary entry for small-town, etymology field small + town (packet source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:1962506254:1101)
登入就可以看每一支怎麼連回核心畫面。