Grok Transplanted…
Grok transplanted….
Can you Grok This????
“Grok,” My favorite word is really about a concept, From
Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and you really have to read the book to Grok why it is such a heavy concept, but I have borrowed the below from another website, with a link to it, to try and explain….:
“Perhaps least of all, it anticipated Nancy Reagan’s reliance on astrology and spawned the water bed and the neologism “grok,” (Heinlein’s Martian verb for a thorough understanding), though “grok” would never have taken hold, had the young rebels of the 1960s not discovered Stranger as their counterculture bible. Some went even further and formed “nests” and churches based on what they found in Stranger; perhaps the most famous instance of that is the Church of All Worlds, a pagan group who lifted its name and logo intact from the book. Stranger has also begun to be included in many canonical college reading lists, and Billy Joel saw fit to mention the title in his 1989 Top-40 hit about history, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
Excerpts Captain van Tromp decided that it was time to throw a tantrum. “This man Smith – This ‘man!’ Can’t you see that he is not?”
“Eh?”
“Smith . . . is . . . not . . . a . . . man.”
“Huh? Explain yourself, Captain.”
“Smith is an intelligent creature with the ancestry of a man, but he is more Martian than man. Until we came along he had never laid eyes on a man. He thinks like a Martian, feels like a Martian. He’s been brought up by a race which has nothing in common with us – they don’t even have sex. He’s a man by ancestry, a Martian by environment. . . ”
http://www.wegrokit.com/stranger_in_a_strange_land.htm
3/11/2004
