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Sep 7, 2012
This week's theme
Whose what?

This week's words
crow's feet
god's penny
fool's paradise
winner's circle
writer's block

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A.Word.A.Day
with Anu Garg

writer's block

PRONUNCIATION:
(RY-tuhrs blok)

MEANING:
noun: A usually temporary psychological inhibition preventing one from proceeding with a piece of writing.

ETYMOLOGY:
After the term 'block' or 'blocking' used to describe obstruction in mental processes resulting in an inability to do a certain task. Earliest documented use: 1950.

NOTES:
The writer's block has been described as the situation when your imaginary friends won't talk to you. But this condition is not limited to fiction writers or even to writers. Here's the composer Rossini's advice on this matter:
"Wait until the evening before the opening night. Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it be the presence of a copyist waiting for your work or for the prodding of an impresario tearing his hair. In my time, all the impresarios in Italy were bald at thirty."

USAGE:
This writer's block is terrible. I don't know how to get the story to flow again."
Tina Leonard; The Renegade Cowboy Returns; Harlequin; 2012.

See more usage examples of writer's block in Vocabulary.com's dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things. -Jean Baudrillard, sociologist and philosopher (1929-2007)

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