From: Joe E. Dees (jdees0@students.uwf.edu)
Date: Fri Nov 13 1998 - 01:12:23 MST
Subject: what does the word grok mean?
Date sent: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 18:28:24 +1100
From: Timothy Bates <tbates@bunyip.bhs.mq.edu.au>
To: "Extropians" <extropians@extropy.com>
Send reply to: extropians@extropy.com
> Hi Spike and listers,
>
> >Timothy Bates wrote:
> >> As you go on to note, libertarian's just don't grok tax in the first...
>
> Spike said:
> >define please this term "grok." i saw it used in ed regis' book
> >nano, but the context was uncertain. thanks! spike
>
> grok is Unix-geek speak: it means "get it".
>
> if you are etomologically minded, check out
> http://whatis.com/grok.htm
>
> it may be the first exptropian word in common currency ;-)
>
> best
> tim
>
It comes from Robert A. Heinlein's novel STRANGER IN A
STRANGE LAND (a book which inspired the Church of All Worlds,
publisher of GREEN EGG Magazine) and was usually used in that
book as part of the phrase "grok it in its fullness." This meant to
understand something completely, from the internal (and all external)
perspectives. Of course, this is an existential and phenomenological
impossibility in practice, but it remains an abstract ideal by which it
is useful to measure/compare one's mental grasp of something, and
attempt to asymptotically attain. Joe
>
> ____________________
> "Prescription Drugs Kill More Than Street Drugs,"
> Properly prescribed legal drugs killed 106,000 Americans each year, due
> to toxic reactions. That's more that *twenty times* the number of
> Americans killed by illegal drugs, estimated at 5,212."
> New England Journal of Medicine, April 1998.
>
> see also
> "Incidence of Adverse Drug Reactions in Hospitalized Patients," Journal
> of the American Medical Association (JAMA). April 1998
>
> "The Public and the War On Illicit Drugs," JAMA, March 18, 1998.
>
>
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