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"I do think there is a link in that in both cases, writing fiction or writing a computer program, at any given moment you're focusing on a very specific and particular thing—one word, one line of code, whatever."
- Neal Stephenson
 |
| Grok | ||
| To understand fully; become one with (from the Martial verb "to drink"). |
| "Mike, who made the world?" "Beg pardon?" "Look around you. All this. Mars, too. The stars. Everything. You and me and everybody. Did the Old Ones tell you who made it?" Mike looked puzzled. "No, Jubal." "Well, you have wondered about it, haven't you? Where did this all come from? Who put the stars in the sky? Who started it all? All of it, everything, the whole world, the Universe - . so that you and I are I talking." Jubal paused, surprised at himself. He had intended to take the usual agnostic approach . . . and found himself compulsively following his legal training, being an honest advocate in spite of himself, attempting to support a religious belief he did not hold but which was believed most human beings. He found that, willy-nilly, he was attorney for the orthodoxies of his own race against-he wasn't sure what. An unhuman viewpoint. "How do your Old Ones answer such questions?" "Jubal, I do not grok ... that these are questions. I am sorry." "Eh? I don't grok your answer." Mike hesitated a long time. "I will try. But words are ... are not rightly. Not 'putting.' Not 'mading.' A nowing. World is. World was. World shall be. Now." "'As it was in the beginning, so it now and ever shall be, World without end-'" Mike smiled happily. "You grok it!" "I don't grok it," Jubal answered gruffly... |
| Technovelgy from Stranger in a Strange Land,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Putnam in 1961 Additional resources -
|
Here is more context from the book:
“Huh?” said Jubal. “Mike never says ‘grok’ when he’s just talking about drinking. He—”
“Just a moment.” Mahmoud spoke to Mike in Martian.
Mike looked faintly surprised. “‘Grok’ is drink.”
“But Mike would have agreed,” Mahmoud went on, “if I had named a hundred other English words, words which we think of as different concepts, even antithetical concepts. ‘Grok’ means all of these. It means ‘fear,’ it means ‘love,’ it means ‘hate’—proper hate, for by the Martian ‘map’ you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you—then you can hate. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate—and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.”
“‘Grok’ means ‘identically equal.’ The human cliché ‘This hurts me worse than it does you’ has a distinctly Martian flavor. The Martian seems to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that observer interacts with observed through the process of observation. ‘Grok’ means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us as color does to a blind man.” Mahmoud paused. “Jubal, if I chopped you up and made a stew, you and the stew, whatever was in it, would grok—and when I ate you, we would grok together and nothing would be lost and it would not matter which one of us did the eating.”
“Take this word: ‘grok.’ Its literal meaning, one which I suspect goes back to the origin of the Martian race as thinking creatures—and which throws light on their whole ‘map’—is easy. ‘Grok’ means ‘to drink.’”
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