Stranger With a Strange Word: Grok

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Debbie Thomas. I am from Crawfordville, Florida.

I’m calling about a word that my husband uses all the time. We’ve both grown to use it all the time. Now all of our friends know what it means.

The word is grok. And the first time my husband said, let’s grok on this, I reach over and, of course, turn the stereo up. And, you know, get a look from him. And he said he picked it up from his boss back in the 70s who had come home from Vietnam. And ever since then, it’s just been a word in our vocabulary, but do we get the looks when people are over helping us with a project? And we do know we’re using it correctly.

When we have to stop and grok on something, we know that we have to contemplate. We have to think about it. We have to get on the same page. You know, if we come to an impasse, let’s grok on it. And I’m just wondering what kind of information you can give me on such a weird word. Grok on it.

And how are you spelling that? In your mind. In my mind, I’m spelling it G-R-O-C-K. Grok. All right. So you learned it from your husband. And he learned it from his boss. And his boss believes he picked it up in Vietnam? Yes.

What kind of work did your husband do at the time and did his boss do? Okay. At the time, he worked in like a tire company where they retread tires. It was called Big Ten Tires. And his boss was like the manager of the shop. Okay.

Was your husband or his boss into science fiction? Oh, my gosh, yes. Yes. You say that like a… I don’t know so much about the boss, but my husband, I mean, the cheesier, the better. Did he go to conventions dressed up, that sort of thing? No, no, no, no. He’s nowhere like that. But he, like I said, he gets interested in some of the cheesiest old, old sci-fi shows. And, of course, it’s not my thing.

Does he read the books? I think when he was younger, he probably did. Yeah. Yes. So I’m zeroing in on something important here, is that we know the origin of this word. Unlike a lot of words, we know where this came from. And the usual spelling is G-R-O-K, grok, and it comes from a 1961 science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein, H-E-I-N-L-E-I-N, where it appears 195 times.

Really? Oh, my gosh. Yeah, in this book, it starts out as a Martian word that means to drink. But the characters in the book also use it figuratively so that grok means to have a profound understanding, to completely understand something, to become one with what you were observing. That’s how we use it. That’s how we use it.

Well, let’s just stop and grok on it. We’re going to figure this out in a minute. You’ve changed it a little bit, so you’ve turned it into a verb, to grok it, is to think about it. And that’s okay. That’s just fine.

Heinlein later talked about, because he was always asked about this word in interviews, particularly after the word took on a life of its own. And he later said that grok meant to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in the group experience. I love it.

Yeah. And so it’s been used off and on over the years. It’s still a little bit associated with people who like science fiction, and it kind of has a stronger life in the technology fields with people who work in, say, programming or information technology, IT sort of thing, because there’s a lot of overlap between people who like science fiction and people who work in those fields.

But you will find it, for example, in the writing of Tom Wolfe, the famous writer Tom Wolfe. So it’s not that common, so I’m not surprised that your friends don’t know, but if they watch Rachel Maddow on MSCNBC, she sometimes uses it. I will have to tell them. I’m making notes so I can tell everybody this. I had no idea.

Well, Debbie, I’m so glad you called because we don’t usually get a chance to talk about etymologies that involve the Martian language. So this is really exciting for us. This is really going to excite my husband when I tell him this. It really is. Because he may be wrong where he thought he got it from.

Well, it’s possible that his boss was a secret science fiction reader as well. You never know. That’s true. That’s true. I just told her, no, I got it there so it sounds a little more official. I don’t know. But thank you so much. That was really, really interesting.

Well, it’s our pleasure. Thank you for talking to us, Debbie. Take care of yourself. All right. Y’all have a good weekend. Bye-bye. You too. Bye-bye.

Well, we don’t have a phone number for Martians to reach us, but you can find all kinds of ways to contact us. Just go to our website, waywordradio.org, slash contact.