Blast it. What is an Oblast?

Perhaps it is just me.  

As a child, I remember letting new words and concepts flow over me with the well justified confidence that their meaning would become clear.  The same when learning foreign languages.  

Some words are clearly so critical to comprehension of a sentence or a paragraph that you have to look them up, but most become clear, if you are patient, within the context.  In addition, you pretty quickly pick up additional clues such as recognizing that an unfamiliar word has a known root and therefore you can extrapolate at least the general idea of what it means.  

But as you grow older and as your base of knowledge grows both deeper and wider, an inherent consequence is that unique words and/or concepts are indeed truly unique and difficult to infer from context.  "Overton Window" or "Time binding" might be examples.  Sort of inferring doesn't really get you usefully far.  You have to look it up.

Simultaneously, with the internet, it has become incredibly easy to define things.  Five seconds?  Ten seconds?  Not that much of a deal.

But I find myself occasionally going long periods seeing a new word, not knowing what it means.  I don't take the five seconds to bother looking it up.

Why?  I don't know.  Sometimes it is because the word is not critical to comprehension.  Oblast is the word that prompted this thought.

I have been seeing it for five weeks since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.  From context it is pretty clearly some sort of governmental administrative area but whether it is the equivalent of what we would call a neighborhood, a city, an SMSA, a county or a state, I don't know.  And I haven't really needed to know, needed enough to be compelled to spend five seconds looking it up.

With the Russian withdrawal from various around Ukraine in the last couple of days, I am seeing a flurry of reports which all reference areas such as "Kyiv Oblast" or "Kharkov Oblast", etc. 

I finally get off my lazy cognitive butt and lookup Oblast.  The initial return is not particularly useful.

o·blast

/ˈôbləst,ˌäblast/

noun

an administrative division or region in Russia and the former Soviet Union, and in some of its former constituent republics.

OK.  I had already inferred that.  Now it's a ten second investment.

Wikipedia sheds some light.

The term is often translated as "area", "zone", "province" or "region". The last translation may lead to confusion, because "raion" may be used for other kinds of administrative division, which may be translated as "region", "district" or "county" depending on the context.

Reading some more and then checking other sources, there is a tangled linguistic and governance history here.  Now I am up to five minutes searching on an item that in the scheme of things is entirely peripheral to my productivity or my needed knowledge.  

The net outcome is that Oblast seems roughly equivalent to what we would call a district, county, or SMSA.  Good enough to be done with it.

Two lessons learned.  

1)  It is not bad to wait for something to become clear when it is not actually critical to comprehension.

2)  Some things can go almost indefinitely without needing to be defined.