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

[Jonathan Lighter]

Also in '50s Manhattan.

JL

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 12:09 PM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Poster:       Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: (across the) "block" ~= street, and the OED?
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> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> In my Brooklyn childhood, there was a key difference "block" and
> "street" -- block referred to a part of the street between two cross
> streets. If we live on the same street, we may not live on the same
> block. "Down the street" might be further away than "down the block".
>
> DanG
>
> On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 11:19 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
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> > Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> > Subject:      Re: (across the) "block" ~= street, and the OED?
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > 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."
> >
> > ----------
> > So the expression was in use in my youth.
> >
> > Joel
> >
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