Editing Grok

{{About|the word Grok|the chatbot developed by xAI|Grok (chatbot)|other uses|Grok (disambiguation)}}
{{Redirect|Grokking|the explanation of the word/phrase in machine learning|Grokking (machine learning)}}
{{Short description|Neologism coined by Robert Heinlein}}
{{italic title}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=November 2020}}
'''''Grok''''' ({{IPAc-en|ˈ|ɡ|r|ɒ|k}}) 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",<ref name=OED/> 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."<ref name=CR/> 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).<ref name=Wright/> 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'".<ref name=Wright/> Critics have bridged this absence of explicit definition by citing passages from ''Stranger'' that illustrate the term. A selection of these passages follows:

{{Blockquote|''Grok'' means "to understand", of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, "to drink" and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. 'Grok' means ''all'' of these. It means 'fear', it means 'love', it means 'hate'&nbsp;— 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&nbsp;— then you can hate it. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can ''hate''&nbsp;— and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.<ref name=McGiveron/>}}

{{Blockquote|''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 acts with observed through the process of observation. ''Grok'' means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed&nbsp;— 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.<ref name=McGiveron/><ref name=Singer/>}}

{{Blockquote|The Martian Race had encountered the people of the fifth planet, grokked them completely, and had taken action; asteroid ruins were all that remained, save that the Martians continued to praise and cherish the people they had destroyed.<ref name=McGiveron/>}}

{{Blockquote|All that groks is God.<ref name=Berger/>}}

==Etymology==
Robert A. Heinlein originally [[neologism|coined]] the term ''grok'' in his 1961 novel ''[[Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land#Grok|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.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Joy |first1=Surya |title=Robert Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’: A Postmodern Study |journal=International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences |date=2021 |volume=6 |issue=4 |page=243 |doi=10.22161/ijels.64.36 |url=https://ijels.com/detail/robert-heinlein-s-stranger-in-a-strange-land-a-postmodern-study/ |access-date=18 October 2024 |issn=2456-7620|doi-access=free }}</ref>

According to the book, drinking water is a central focus on [[Water on Mars|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''.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Garg |first1=Anu |author1-link=Anu Garg |title=grok |url=https://wordsmith.org/words/grok1.html |website=Wordsmith.org |access-date=18 October 2024}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=grok |url=https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/grok |website=Vocabulary.com |access-date=18 October 2024}}</ref>

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 [[International Phonetic Alphabet|IPA]] transcription might be {{IPA|[ɡɹ̩kʰ]}}).<ref>{{cite web |last1=Shenoy |first1=Gautham |title=Brave New Words (or rather, a few more of them) |url=https://archive.factordaily.com/brave-new-words-or-rather-a-few-more-of-them/ |website=[[FactorDaily]] |access-date=18 October 2024 |date=14 April 2018}}</ref> [[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".<ref>{{cite web |title=What’s a GRIGGO? |url=https://griggo.org/ |website=griggo.org |access-date=18 October 2024 |quote=In the 1949 short story “Venus and the Seven Sexes” by William Tenn, the author coined the term “griggo” as a Venusian basic sense describing intuitive understanding. Tenn used “griggo” as both a noun and a verb in phrases like “I griggoed his impatience.”  Over a decade later, acclaimed sci-fi author Robert Heinlein published his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, which introduced the word “grok” with a similar meaning of deep, empathetic comprehension.  Heinlein’s “grok” became hugely influential in 1960s counter-culture and lexicon. When asked if he was inspired by Tenn’s prior “griggo,” Heinlein admitted “It’s possible, very possible.”}}</ref>

==Adoption and modern usage==

===In computer programmer culture===
Uses of the word in the decades after the 1960s are more concentrated in [[Cyberculture|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."<ref>{{cite magazine |url = https://books.google.com/books?id=uS4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA32 |title = The Sixth Generation |access-date = 2024-01-04 |author = Doug Clapp |date = 1984-05-21 |magazine = Infoworld |page = 32 }}</ref>

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:<ref>{{cite web |title=grok |url=https://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/G/grok.html |website=[[Jargon File]] |access-date=18 October 2024}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |title=Jargon File version 2.7.1 |url=https://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/oldversions/jarg271.txt |website=Jargon File |access-date=18 October 2024 |date=1 March 1991}}</ref>

{{quote|When you claim to "grok" some knowledge or technique, you are asserting that you have not merely learned it in a detached instrumental way but that it has become part of you, part of your identity. For example, to say that you "know" [[Lisp (programming language)|Lisp]] is simply to assert that you can code in it if necessary{{snd}}but to say you "grok" Lisp is to claim that you have deeply entered the world-view and spirit of the language, with the implication that it has transformed your view of programming. Contrast [[zen]], which is a similar supernatural understanding experienced as a single brief flash.}}

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 [[CPU cache|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.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Conway |first1=Damian |author1-link=Damian Conway |title=Perl Best Practices |date=2005 |publisher=[[O'Reilly Media]] |location=Sebastopol, California |isbn=0-596-00173-8 |pages=4–5}}</ref>

==== 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".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Negus |first1=Christopher |title=Linux Bible |date=2005 |edition=1st |publisher=[[John Wiley & Sons]] |location=Hoboken, New Jersey |isbn=0764589741}}</ref>

The book ''[[Cyberia (book)|Cyberia]]'' covers its use in this subculture extensively:<ref>{{cite book |last1=Rushkoff |first1=Douglas |author1-link=Douglas Rushkoff |title=Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace |date=1994 |publisher=[[Harper San Francisco]] |location=San Francisco, California |isbn=9780062510105}}</ref>

{{quote|This is all latter day usage, the original derivation was from an early text processing utility from so long ago that no one remembers but, grok was the output when it understood the file. [[Brian Kernighan|K]]&[[Dennis Ritchie|R]] would remember.}}

* The main web page for [[cURL]], an open source tool and programming library, describes the function of cURL as "cURL groks URLs".<ref name=curl/>
* The [[keystroke logging]] software used by the NSA for its remote intelligence gathering operations is named GROK.<ref name=intercept/>
* One of the most powerful parsing filters used in [[Elasticsearch]] software's logstash component is named ''grok''.<ref>{{cite web |title=Grok filter plugin |url=https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/logstash/current/plugins-filters-grok.html |website=[[Elasticsearch]] |access-date=18 October 2024}}</ref>
* A reference book by Carey Bunks on the use of the GNU Image Manipulation Program is titled ''Grokking the GIMP''.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Bunks |first1=Carey |title=Grokking the GIMP |url=http://dev.cs.ovgu.de/tutorials/Grokking-the-GIMP-v1.0/ |website=Carey Bunks |access-date=18 October 2024}}</ref>
* The generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by [[XAI (company)|xAI]] is named [[Grok (chatbot)|Grok]]''.''<ref>{{Cite web |title=Grok |url=https://x.ai/grok |access-date=2025-01-09 |website=x.ai |language=en}}</ref>

===In counterculture===
{{see also|Counterculture of the 1960s}}

*[[Tom Wolfe]], in his book ''[[The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test]]'' (1968), describes a character's thoughts during an [[Psychedelic experience|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{{nbs}}... he has never seen any of this flesh before, this stranger. He groks over that{{nbs}}..."<ref name="wolfe1968">{{cite book|author=Tom Wolfe|title=The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test|publisher=[[Farrar, Straus and Giroux]]|ISBN	=978-0-553-38064-4|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9io09MPj55EC&q=%22He+groks+over+that%22|year=1968|page=96}}</ref>

*In his counterculture [[Volkswagen]] repair manual, ''How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat<!--not a typo--> Idiot'' (1969), dropout aerospace engineer [[John Muir (engineer)|John Muir]] instructs prospective used VW buyers to "grok the car" before buying.<ref name="MuirGregg1971">{{cite book|author1=John Muir|author2=Tosh Gregg|title=How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=guPXAAAAMAAJ&q=grok|year=1971|publisher=John Muir Publications|isbn=978-0-912528-33-5|page=16}}</ref>

*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'':<ref>{{cite book |last1=Wilson |first1=Robert Anton |last2=Shea |first2=Robert Joseph |author1-link=Robert Anton Wilson |author2-link=Robert Shea |title=The Illuminatus! Trilogy Omnibus |date=1984 |publisher=[[Random House]] |isbn=9780307569646 |page=174}}</ref>
{{blockquote|I caught the references to Aristotle, the old man of the tribe with his unfortunate epistemological paresis, and also to that feisty little lady I always imagine is really the lost Anastasia, but I still didn’t grok. “What do you mean?” I asked (...)}}

*And in ''The Trick Top Hat'', volume two of ''Schrödinger's Cat'':<ref>{{cite book |last1=Wilson |first1=Robert Anton |title=Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy: "The Universe Next Door", "The Trick Top Hat", & "The Homing Pigeons" |date=1979 |publisher=[[Dell Publishing]] |location=New York |isbn=0-440-50070-2 |page=242}}</ref>
{{blockquote|Williams went on. "You've got to think of time ripples, as well as space ripples, to grok the quantum world. ..."}}

==See also==
{{Portal|Speculative fiction|Linguistics}}
<!--Please keep entries in alphabetical order and include short descriptions.-->
* {{in lang|de}} [[:de:Anschauung|Anschauung]] –  related "sense-perception" concept in [[Kantianism|Kantian philosophy]]
*{{Annotated link|Appropriation (sociology)}}
* [[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 (learning)|generalization]] that occurs many training iterations after the [[interpolation threshold]], after many iterations of seemingly little progress
* [[Introjection#Fritz and Laura Perls|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
*{{Annotated link|Qi}}
<!--Please keep entries in alphabetical order and include short descriptions.-->

==References==
{{Reflist | refs=
<ref name=OED>{{Cite OED|grok|short=yes|date=1989}}</ref>
<ref name=CR>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VQZtIqYCshEC&pg=PT67 | title=The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction | last=Csicsery-Ronay Jr. | first=Istvan | page=67 | publisher=Wesleyan University Press | year=2008 | isbn=978-0-8195-6889-2}}</ref>
<ref name=McGiveron>{{cite news | title=From Free Love to the Free-Fire Zone: Heinlein's Mars, 1939–1987 | journal=Extrapolation | volume=42 | number=2 | year=2001 | publisher=Kent State UP | last=McGiveron | first = Rafeeq O. | url=https://www.proquest.com/openview/db0060c4efb1ebd6d786815404df56b1/1?pq-origsite=gscholar }}</ref>
<ref name=Singer>{{cite news | title=The Player and the Cards: Nihilism and Legal Theory | last=Singer | first=Joseph William | journal=The Yale Law Journal | volume=94 | number=1 | date=November 1984 | pages=1–70}}</ref>
<ref name=Berger>{{cite journal | title=Theories of History and Social Order in "Astounding Science Fiction" | last=Berger | first=Albert I. | journal=Science Fiction Studies | volume=15 | number=1 | date=March 1988 | pages=12–35}}</ref>
<ref name=Wright>{{cite news | title=Do Words Have Inherent Meaning? | last=Wright Sr. | first=David E. | journal=ETC: A Review of General Semantics | volume=65 | number=2 | date=April 2008 | pages=177–190 | publisher=Institute of General Semantics 42578827 |jstor=42578827 }}</ref>
<ref name=curl>{{cite web | title =curl groks URLs | work =cURL | url =http://curl.haxx.se/ | access-date = 9 September 2013}}</ref>
<ref name=intercept>{{cite web|url=https://theintercept.com/2014/03/12/nsa-plans-infect-millions-computers-malware/|title=How the NSA Plans to Infect 'Millions' of Computers with Malware|author=[[Ryan Gallagher]]|author2=[[Glenn Greenwald]]|date=12 March 2014|work=[[The Intercept]]|access-date=23 May 2016}}</ref>
<!--<ref name="Sanders2002">{{cite book|author=Ed Sanders|title=The Family|url=https://archive.org/details/family00sand|url-access=registration|access-date=9 September 2013|year=2002|publisher=Thunder's Mouth Press|isbn=978-1-56025-396-9|page=[https://archive.org/details/family00sand/page/12 12]|chapter=out of the slams in the year of the flowers}}</ref>-->
}}

==External links==
{{wiktionary}}
* {{cite web | title =Grok | work =The [[Jargon File]] (version 4.4.7) | url =http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/G/grok.html | access-date = 9 September 2013}}
* [http://www.jessesword.com/sf/view/1646 SF citations for grok] gathered for the ''[[Oxford English Dictionary]]'' by [[Jesse Sheidlower]] of the [[Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction]]
* {{cite web | last =Lee | first =Charles | title =Grok and the Vanguard of Science | work =Groks Science Radio Show and Podcast | date =February 2002 | url =https://grokscience.wordpress.com/groks/ | access-date = 2 August 2022}}
* {{cite web | title =grok | work =Merriam-Webster Dictionary | publisher =Merriam-Webster, Incorporated | url =https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grok | access-date = 2 August 2022}}
* {{cite web | title =grok | work =The Free Dictionary | publisher =Farlex, Incorporated | url =https://www.thefreedictionary.com/grokking | access-date = 2 August 2022}}
* [[q:Stranger in a Strange Land|WikiQuote on ''Stranger in a Strange Land'']] includes many uses of ''grok''

{{Heinlein (books)}}

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