Grok - "Stranger in a Strange Land" - Robert A. Heinlein - The Police song "Friends," lyrics state that the singer will "grok your essence."' - David Brin and Greg Cox, have borrowed the term over the years as an homage

Had a conversation with my wife about "grok", and found out, much to my dismay, that she did not know the origin of "grok", nor had she read "Stranger in a Strange Land"!!!

I knew the Etymology of "grok", and shared it ...with my wife:

Robert A. Heinlein originally coined the term grok in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land as a Martian word that literally means "to drink", and had a much more profound figurative meaning that is hard for Earthlings to understand because of our assumption of a singular reality.

According to the book, drinking is a central focus on Mars where water 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 between 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 [ɡɹ̩kʰ]).

(Grok. (2008, June 12). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:36, July 6, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grok&oldid=218959127)

And I then began to uncover things that I did not know about grok...

1. "Other science fiction authors, such as David Brin or Greg Cox, have borrowed the term over the years as an homage." - Wikipedia's Grok
2. 'In The Police song "Friends," lyrics state that the singer will "grok your essence."'
3. Grokker’s web-based, hosted solution, federates internal enterprise information, subscription content and public web services into an intuitive interface that facilitates information discovery and actionable research. Select one or more sources then grok. Yahoo!   Wikipedia   Amazon Books
   
   

We'll be buy "Stranger in a Strange Land" (by Robert A. Heinlein) very soon, and she will read it.

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