Debbie from Crawfordsville, Florida, says that when she and her husband reach an impasse while working on something, they’ll say Let’s grok about it, which they use to mean “Let’s think about it.” Grok was coined by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land (Bookshop|Amazon). Originally meaning “to drink,” grok also came to mean “to have a profound understanding of.” By the way, Grant mispronounces “Heinlein” during this segment. It should be /ˈhaɪn laɪn/ where both syllables rhyme with “line” or “mine.” This is part of a complete episode.
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
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