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A block is just some arbitrarily short distance. It’s the distance between two cross streets, maybe 1/10th of a mile. It’s not intended to be precise.
by fingerlocks 7y ago
A block is just some arbitrarily short distance. It’s the distance between two cross streets, maybe 1/10th of a mile. It’s not intended to be precise.
- kwhitefoot 7y agoIt's worse than not precise, for a large part of the readership here it is utterly meaningless.
- labster 7y agoWhat do you mean by a "large part" of the readership. Is it precise? Natural languages: where ambiguous meanings abound, and yet we manage to form complex social structures nonetheless.
- gambiting 7y agoLet me put it this way - as an European, I have literally never been to a city which is divided into blocks like the American cities are. Every time TV shows/movies mention "oh he ran 5 blocks!" I have no idea if I'm meant to be impressed or disappointed by the distance.
- lolc 7y agoOh I can translate! The city where I live has short distances between bus stops, just about two blocks. That means you have to walk at maximum one block to reach a bus stop.
- gambiting 7y agoI guess that makes sense - distance between bus stops in a city is usually relatively standard, it's a good unit of distance to think of.
- varjag 7y agoAs another European, I grew up in a city that was divided into blocks and where "couple blocks away" was idiomatic common expression.
- gambiting 7y agoI mean I know they exist - Barcelona is divided into blocks I think. But personally I've never been to a city like that.
- nkrisc 7y agoFair. Then you can think about it this way: the average difference between any two adjacent intersections in a given city.
- ginko 7y agoOh there's plenty of blocks in Vienna. They're just not necessarily rectangular.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoIsn't a block a cuboid?
- ebg13 7y agoIt sounds like you're conflating blocks and rectangular grid plan. A block is just a cluster of buildings in an urban or semiurban environment that don't have streets between them. They don't have to be rectangular. When used as an informal distance, it means the distance between subsequent urban cross-streets that you should be able to walk in about a minute. If you've been anywhere in Europe that has more people than sheep, then you've definitely seen blocks without realizing it.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoAh, OK, I assumed it was some standard demarcation - like in USA cities the modal average distance between crossroads (intersections) was 80m, or something. In UK we say "to the next corner" sometimes (but not as a measurement, per se), I guess that would be equivalent? It sounds like when you say "about a minute" that this would over-rule the "next intersection" part. So when you say "it's a blocks walk away" (or whatever) you're saying "it's a minute['s walk] away"?
- ebg13 7y ago> In UK we say "to the next corner" sometimes (but not as a measurement, per se), I guess that would be equivalent? That would be 100% equivalent when counting blocks. "Go four blocks and then turn left" means "go left at the fourth intersection". There will inevitably be some interpretive ambiguity when one passes a T intersection that only goes right. Was that a block even though there was no available left turn? Did the person mean "pass three lefts and this one doesn't count because it's a right"? Nobody knows. It's why we name streets now. > It sounds like when you say "about a minute" that this would over-rule the "next intersection" part. When talking abstractly, yes. "A block's-worth of walking" cannot be interpreted with any particular block in mind, so one must use an imaginary platonic ideal of block length.
- debrice 7y agolet's be real, I've been living in the US for 10 years now and almost 100% of the US cities are based on a rectangular grid plan. Almost all European cities are too old to have one unless they were rebuilt (ie. Baron Haussmann work in Paris). I don't think he's conflating, I had the same exact impression when hearing "I had to run 5 blocks"... it's just an American thing.
- cdelsolar 7y agowtf? I've been to at least 10 European cities and they all had blocks that were of similar size to ones in American cities.
- gambiting 7y agoWhich ones?
- danielscrubs 7y agoYes, some people don’t know idiomatic English and just double down. Sorry about that.
- Naga 7y agoSounds like its probably a Commonwealth/United States type of thing, as there is another poster here from Australia who said they know what it means. I'm from Canada and it makes perfect sense to me.
- simondw 7y agoIt's not meaningless; you just don't know the meaning. If I were on a website where a good fraction of the people were Francophones, and someone slipped in the word "beaucoup", I wouldn't complain that it's utterly meaningless -- I would politely ask what it meant, or look it up in a dictionary.
- mocha_nate 7y agoI understood instantly. In south and north america people use “block”... not sure about brazil though
- magic_beans 7y agoEvery city/town/village that has intersecting roads has blocks... It's not incomprehensible.