the.com/blocking
The art of making someone vanish without ever leaving your couch.
means The act of preventing someone from contacting or interacting with you on a platform, or more broadly, the physical obstruction of a path or process.
from From the noun 'block,' which traces back to Old French 'bloc' (a log or lump) and Middle Dutch 'blok' (tree trunk), the same root behind a butcher's block and a child's building blocks. The sense of obstruction — a solid mass in the way — gave us 'to block' a path, then a punch, then an actor's movements on stage ('blocking' a scene). The digital sense of cutting off a person is a recent descendant: same idea, invisible log dropped across the road.
- theater origin
- Directors map actor movement with the same word
- sports trenches
- Football linemen exist solely to block bodies
- chess danger
- A blocked pawn can doom an entire position
- writer's curse
- Creative blocking has no agreed scientific cause
- network walls
- Firewalls block packets billions of times daily
russia blocking telegram — russian government blocked the messaging app in 2018 over encryption refusal
twitter blocking trump — permanently suspended @realdonaldtrump account in january 2021