How many meters will you need to avoid gossip?

August 18, 2024 11:21 PM

When Saul Bellow says " She got out a block from church to avoid gossip." in Seize the Day, how many meters do you think this 'a block' is? By the way, the city is Roxbury. Thank you for helping my English study.
posted by mizukko to Writing & Language (13 answers total)

A block is:

(1)
: a usually rectangular space (as in a city) enclosed by streets and occupied by or intended for buildings
She lived on our block.
(2)
: the distance along one of the sides of such a block
The store is two blocks down on the right.
lived a block away from the school

I just measured the distance of a few blocks in Roxbury and they seemed to be about 50 to 100 metres.
posted by iamsuper at 11:35 PM on August 18 [3 favorites]

Best answer: I means one street away, far enough that someone seeing her walking to the church will not see the car that drove her there.

I'd suggest looking at Roxbury on Google Maps street view to get an idea of what a block there looks like. They tend to be long and thin so there is no strict size in meters.
posted by zompist at 12:06 AM on August 19 [5 favorites]

Best answer: The literal distance doesn't matter (and no reader would be expected to know it. Block sizes very widely.) In this context it just means 'far enough away'. So I as a reader would be imagining a somewhat big block, rather than a little one.
posted by trig at 12:48 AM on August 19 [7 favorites]

Best answer: This is an informal expression. There isn't any specific distance associated with it; Bellow could have also said "around the corner" or "across the street" instead. It just means that the character is trying to not be right in front of the church. Zompist explained what "one block away" means well if you want to understand the idea of a "block" in American terms.

Also, don't forget that we Americans don't use the metric system so we don't think in terms of meters anyway, and have to say things in strange ways like this. :-)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:43 AM on August 19 [6 favorites]

Block sizes very widely

Since this is a thread about English I feel a need to point out my typo. "Very" should have been "vary". Sorry!
posted by trig at 3:46 AM on August 19 [2 favorites]

Roxbury is not built on a square grid (you can look at a map), so it’s not a specific distance unless the church is specified. I would think of it as a distance far enough to not be seen from the church entrance.
posted by tchemgrrl at 4:05 AM on August 19 [1 favorite]

Also, don't forget that we Americans don't use the metric system so we don't think in terms of meters anyway, and have to say things in strange ways like this. :-)

Eh, he could have said "yards". But "a block from church" is one of the shortest and tightest ways of conveying the idea: shorter and less needlessly specific than "80 yards from the church", and shorter than "some distance from the church" or "a few minutes away from the church" or "down the street from the church" or even "before they reached the church". He might have gone with "she got off a few minutes early" (if she was traveling in a car) or "she got off a stop early" (if by bus).
posted by trig at 4:26 AM on August 19 [1 favorite]

In Costa Rica saying 100 meters means one block. As someone who does not use the metric system much I have found it a pretty useful tool. Of course block sizes vary but 100 meters or so is probably the right order of magnitude
posted by akabobo at 5:26 AM on August 19

I would interpret this as: far enough away that probably a cross street, maybe a couple buildings, is in between her and the church, far enough to obscure someone's casual view.

When talking about blocks there are literal blocks (for example) to provide quantifiable information on location, etc, and there are figurative blocks, which would describe a place that is not exactly here, but also not too far away.
posted by phunniemee at 5:37 AM on August 19

To me “a block” means down the street but across at least one intersection. Like if the church is on Main St. between 1st and 2nd streets, a block away is Main St. between 2nd and 3rd streets.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 7:10 AM on August 19 [2 favorites]

Yes, there's no standard size to a block in the U.S. Rather, it means that there's a single cross street (or intersection, if you're kitty-corner) between you and the destination. That's generally a shortish distance (in the context here, she presumably got out a little earlier than right at the intersection), but if we were talking a Midtown avenue in Manhattan, for instance, it could be as much as a five-minute walk at a decent pace. I don't actually hear "block" used very often outside the context of an actual city block, though it's often used somewhat casually and imprecisely there, and I think given this author you would expect it to be an actual, not a metaphorical, block.
posted by praemunire at 7:34 AM on August 19 [2 favorites]

A block would generally be 1 cross street, i.e. if I were to walk 4 blocks I would walk past 4 intersections. The specific distance is generally less important than the number of streets you would be crossing.

I'd also note that this is almost only used as a unit of measure in a city where the distance between streets is vaguely uniform and relatively short.

As to the specifics of the distance in the story, it would be safe to assume that the person was dropped off on the next cross street, around the corner so they were out of view.
posted by I paid money to offer this... insight? at 8:26 PM on August 20

Response by poster: Thank you everyone for answering my question. I read all of you with great interest！
posted by mizukko at 6:38 PM on August 21