Grok


Grok is a neologism coined by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein in 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 ; also, to experience enjoyment", Heinlein's concept of a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars is far more nuanced.
The concept of grok has garnered significant critical scrutiny in the years after the book's initial publication. Critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. observed in 2008 that "the book's major theme can be seen as an extended definition of the term". The term and aspects of the underlying concept of the word also have become part of communities such as computer science.

Etymology

Robert A. Heinlein 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 that it had a much more profound figurative meaning that is difficult for terrestrial culture to understand because of the culture's 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.
William Tenn suggests that when creating the word, Heinlein might have been influenced by Tenn's very similar concept of griggo that was introduced in Tenn's 1949 story Venus and the Seven Sexes. In his later afterword to the story, Tenn says Heinlein considered such influence "very possible".

Interpretations of meanings vary

Critic David E. Wright Sr. points out that in the 1991 "uncut" edition of Stranger in a Strange Land, 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. Characterizing the use on page 253 as Heinlein's first "intentional definition" of the word as simply, "to drink", Wright interprets that this defined use of the word is only as 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 the book that they believe illustrate various meanings of the term. A selection of these passages follows:

Adoption and modern use

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 2005 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 would do.

Examples of computer culture use

A typical tech use 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 1994 book, Cyberia, covers its use in this subculture extensively:

Counterculture uses