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Old 04-13-2019, 04:35 AM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ez2cDave
"grok" ?
Somewhere, Robert A. Heinlein is weeping... :-) Grok is a fictional (but nonetheless useful; it is actually in the Oxford English Dictionary: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/grok , and has found surprisingly widespread use) Martian word that Heinlein introduced in his 1961 novel "Stranger in a Strange Land" (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stran...nd#cite_note-16 ), which is about a young man who was born on Mars and raised by Martians, who feels like an alien among his own people when he is brought to Earth. It has nuances of meaning, but boiled down to its essence, to grok something means to comprehend it completely, emotionally (which involves understanding why others enjoy it or find it otherwise desirable) as well as intellectually. While I have never read the novel, I first heard of the word decades ago, and I have found it useful. For example:

My mother found it frustrating that I never took any interest in visiting my father's grave, which she did fairly often. That is one common (although not universal; it is rather rare among people, though) aspect of human behavior that I fail to grok. (I don't ridicule or look down upon "grave visitors," and neither do I think of them as "weak" or in any way inferior because they do that; I have seen others doing it, and gaining some sustenance or peace from it, and that is good.) But:

While I can *intellectually* understand and explain how and why visiting the graves of loved ones helps the living who do that, I cannot *emotionally* understand it, because I cannot feel what they feel. I loved my parents very much, but visiting the plots of ground in which their deceased physical remains are interred is a meaningless exercise to me (and a glance at my signature file below makes it plain that I know that the story of life is far more than a hyphen or a dash between two dates on a stone or a plaque). Also:

There are other things that I understand emotionally (I "get" them, in common parlance), but not intellectually, and thus fail to grok them as well. It's almost as if (and who knows, maybe it did happen this way) Heinlein thought, "I need a Martian--yet easy to pronounce and spell when transliterated into English--word for the novel that expresses full comprehension at all levels [1] in order to convey the historical and cultural gulf between the two races, and [2] beyond the novel, to foster new and broader ways of thinking among human beings," and came up with grok, and:

The novel makes it clear--to further illustrate the differences between Martian and Terran society and culture--that grok (and other Martian words, of course) also has nuances of meaning to Martians that human beings--having a totally different history and experience--can't immediately grasp, or even conceive of; they must be explained in (human) writing, or verbally by an individual who is conversant with both languages and cultures. (It's an interesting intellectual exercise. Even Carl Sagan wondered if--after making radio, laser, or perhaps Bracewell probe contact with another civilization and establishing mutually-intelligible dialogue via scientific and mathematical concepts--the other race and human beings could ever ^fully^ understand and comprehend each other; as he mused [not verbatim, but close enough], "But they may always be, in some unfathomable way, different, such that we might never fully understand each other as two people can.")
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