I got so excited to discover that this word can actually be found in our class dictionary. It comes from Stranger in a Strange Land, a science fiction novel written by Robert Heinlein in 1961. It is a word supposedly derived from ancient Martian to mean (according to the American Heritage College Dictionary), "to understand profoundly through intuition or empathy". According to Heinlein, the word translates literally as "to drink", but 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 (because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man." The idea of linguistic determinism, or that language shapes one's thoughts, was popular at the time of its writing. I love that the English language managed to scoop up and embrace a word as silly and made-up as "grok"-- what a true testament to its flexibility! Not only is it in the dictionary, but there are many references to it in popular culture even today.
It's a secret wish of mine to coin a term that finds its way into the dictionary. How hard could it really be?
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ReplyDeleteExcellent choice. It's fun to see how much effort it takes the characters in the novel to understand that one word, and all because "grok" originated in not merely a foreign language, but a foreign way of understanding life.
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