Grok

''Grok'' () is a neologism coined by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science fiction novel '' Stranger in a Strange Land''. While the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' summarizes the meaning of ''grok'' as "to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment", Heinlein's concept is far more nuanced, with critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. observing that "the book's major theme can be seen as an extended definition of the term." The concept of ''grok'' garnered significant critical scrutiny in the years after the book's initial publication. The term and aspects of the underlying concept have become part of communities such as computer science.

Descriptions in ''Stranger in a Strange Land''

Critic David E. Wright Sr. points out that in the 1991 "uncut" edition of ''Stranger'', the word ''grok'' "was used first ''without any explicit definition'' on page 22" and continued to be used without being explicitly defined until page 253 (emphasis in original). He notes that this first intensional definition is simply "to drink", but that this is only a metaphor "much as English 'I see' often means the same as 'I understand'". Critics have bridged this absence of explicit definition by citing passages from ''Stranger'' that illustrate the term. A selection of these passages follows:

Etymology

Robert A. Heinlein originally coined the term ''grok'' in his 1961 novel '' Stranger in a Strange Land'' as a Martian word that could not be defined in Earthling terms, but can be associated with various literal meanings such as "water", "to drink", "to relate", "life", or "to live", and had a much more profound figurative meaning that is hard for terrestrial culture to understand because of its assumption of a singular reality.

According to the book, drinking water is a central focus on Mars, where it is scarce. Martians use the merging of their bodies with water as a simple example or symbol of how two entities can combine to create a new reality greater than the sum of its parts. The water becomes part of the drinker, and the drinker part of the water. Both ''grok'' each other. Things that once had separate realities become entangled in the same experiences, goals, history, and purpose. Within the book, the statement of divine immanence verbalized among the main characters, "thou art God", is logically derived from the concept inherent in the term ''grok''.

Heinlein describes Martian words as "guttural" and "jarring". Martian speech is described as sounding "like a bullfrog fighting a cat". Accordingly, ''grok'' is generally pronounced as a guttural ''gr'' terminated by a sharp ''k'' with very little or no vowel sound (a narrow IPA transcription might be ). William Tenn suggests Heinlein in creating the word might have been influenced by Tenn's very similar concept of ''griggo'', earlier introduced in Tenn's story '' Venus and the Seven Sexes'' (published in 1949). In his later afterword to the story, Tenn says Heinlein considered such influence "very possible".

Adoption and modern usage

In computer programmer culture

Uses of the word in the decades after the 1960s are more concentrated in computer culture, such as an ''InfoWorld'' columnist in 1984 imagining a computer saying, "There isn't any software! Only different internal states of hardware. It's all hardware! It's a shame programmers don't grok that better."

The Jargon File, which describes itself as "The Hacker's Dictionary" and has been published under that name three times, puts ''grok'' in a programming context:

The entry existed in the very earliest forms of the Jargon File in the early 1980s.

The book '' Perl Best Practices'' defines ''grok'' as understanding a portion of computer code in a profound way. It goes on to suggest that to ''re-grok'' code is to reload the intricacies of that portion of code into one's memory after some time has passed and all the details of it are no longer remembered. In that sense, ''to grok'' means to load everything into memory for immediate use. It is analogous to the way a processor caches memory for short term use, but the only implication by this reference was that it was something a human (or perhaps a Martian) would do.

Examples of usage

A typical tech usage from the ''Linux Bible'' characterizes the Unix software development philosophy as "one that can make your life a lot simpler once you grok the idea".

The book '' Cyberia'' covers its use in this subculture extensively:

* The main web page for cURL, an open source tool and programming library, describes the function of cURL as "cURL groks URLs".
* The keystroke logging software used by the NSA for its remote intelligence gathering operations is named GROK.
* One of the most powerful parsing filters used in Elasticsearch software's logstash component is named ''grok''.
* A reference book by Carey Bunks on the use of the GNU Image Manipulation Program is titled ''Grokking the GIMP''.
* The generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI is named Grok''.''

In counterculture

*Tom Wolfe, in his book '' The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'' (1968), describes a character's thoughts during an acid trip: "He looks down, two bare legs, a torso rising up at him and like he is just noticing them for the first time... he has never seen any of this flesh before, this stranger. He groks over that..."

*In his counterculture Volkswagen repair manual, ''How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot'' (1969), dropout aerospace engineer John Muir instructs prospective used VW buyers to "grok the car" before buying.

*The word was used numerous times by Robert Anton Wilson in his works '' The Illuminatus! Trilogy'' and '' Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy''. For instance, in ''The Eye in the Pyramid'', volume one of ''Illuminatus'':

*And in ''The Trick Top Hat'', volume two of ''Schrödinger's Cat'':

See also

* Anschauung – related "sense-perception" concept in Kantian philosophy
*
* Being-in-the-world – a term in the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger, aimed at deconstructing the subject–object distinction
* Geek
* Grokking (machine learning) - a transition to generalization that occurs many training iterations after the interpolation threshold, after many iterations of seemingly little progress
* Introjection vs assimilation in Fritz and Laura Perls' gestalt therapy – analogous to memorizing vs grokking
* Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description – a distinction in philosophy between familiarity with a person, place, or thing and knowledge of facts
* Logos – a term in Western philosophy that has been used to describe various forms of knowledge and reasoning
* Nerd
* Phenomenology (psychology) – the study of subjective experience
*

References

External links

*

SF citations for grok
gathered for the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' by Jesse Sheidlower of the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction
*
*
*
* WikiQuote on ''Stranger in a Strange Land'' includes many uses of ''grok''

{{Heinlein (books)

Hippie movement
Science fiction themes
Robert A. Heinlein
1961 neologisms
Words originating in fiction
Sources of knowledge