(across the) "block" ~= street, and the OED?

[Joel S. Berson]

At 4/29/2011 08:48 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Strangely, I can't recall whether it was possible to go "across the block"
>(i.e., straight across the street), but I doubt it. My ambivalence may
>reflect a childhood usage that I had to abandon as too advanced for society
>at that time.

I don't know what part of NYC you were a child in, Jon (if indeed you
were a child in NYC), but when I was a child there, there was too
much dangerous traffic to go across the block ...
unaccompanied.  (While that was in the Bronx, I don't think it was
Jennifer Lopez's block.)

But seriously, I can imagine (but will not avow) having said "he
lives across the block from me" -- another usage that seems to make
"block" linear rather than planar.  As Wilson noted, "N blocks away"
is a line, whether straight, with angles, or curved, stretching N streets.

And for "across the block" -- from Google --

1)  Stupid kids from across the block. Tire swing accident.  1 min -
Jun 16, 2010 - Youtube.

2)  Prototype 2 trailer throws a man across the block.  Mar 16, 2011
... In this case, the trick is throwing a man so hard that he flies
across the block, hits a car, and then explodes in a massive shockwave of ...

3)  little dude from across the streets friend from across the block
...Facebook.


 From Google Books (Full view) --

1)  1864 [the earliest I saw] -- Journals of the Senate and Assembly
of the Fifteenth Session of the Legislature of the State of
California. Volume 2.  Sacramento: O. M. Clayes, State
Printer.  1864.  [Multiple documents, multiple paginations.]  In
"Reports and Proceedings of the Joint Committee of the Legislature to
Investigate the Destruction of the Battery of Guns, March 14, 1864"
(document 10).  Page [not 58 but] 59:

"Answer.---I live on the southwest corner of Thirteenth and M
streets, fronting this building, across the block from it. When the
alarm was first given, was tending to my horses at the stables in the
roar of my house."

[Probably "Fifth Session. Saturday, March 19 1[864]."]


2)  1884 -- Index to the Miscellaneous Documents of the House of
Representatives for the First Session of the Forty-Eighth Congress,
1883-'84. In Forty Volumes.  Washington: Government Printing Office.
1884.  [Multiple paginations.]  In "48th Congress, 1st
Session.  House of Representatives.  Mis. Doc., No. 59. Site for
Public Building in Brooklyn, N.Y. Testimony taken before the
Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds Relative to the purchase of
a site for a public building in Brooklyn, N.Y.  June 17,
1884.---Ordered to be printed."  Page 155 [p. 550 in PDF]:

---A. No, sir; but they could get off at the proper place and walk
across the block.
Q. It is more than a block across there; it is about five blocks, is
it not?---A. Oh, hardly so much as that, I think.
Q. Do you know the distance:---A. Well, I do not think it is more
than two or three blocks.

[Page 154 dates testimony "Brooklyn, N.Y., June 9, 1884."]

"Distance" seems definitive.


3)  1914 --  Forty-Third Annual report of the Railroad and Warehouse
Commission of the State of Illinois for the Year Ending June 30,
1913, Volume 2.  Springfield: Illinois State Journal Co. 1914. Volume
43 - Page 236:

"The practice of the people it appears from the record is to leave
Oak Street, go across the block between the elevators and between the
box cars across the side track and across the main track to the
depot, all of which is more or less ...  [spoiler alert] dangerous."

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So the expression was in use in my youth.

Joel

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