Today’s word of the day, courtesy of the Words Coach (https://www.wordscoach.com/dictionary) is grok. Pronounced / grɒk /, this verb means “to understand thoroughly and intuitively” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/grok).

Grok first appears in English in “1961, an arbitrary formation by U.S. science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) in his book ‘Stranger in a Strange Land.’ In the book it is a transliteration of a Martian word and is said to mean etymologically ‘to drink.’ It attained popular use in 1960s-70s counterculture but is perhaps obsolete now except in internet technology circles” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=grok).

Merriam-Webster says, “Grok may be the only English word that derives from Martian. Yes, we do mean the language of the planet Mars. No, we’re not getting spacey; we’ve just ventured into the realm of Strange Land. The book’s main character, Valentine Michael Smith, is a Martian-raised human who comes to Earth as an adult, bringing with him words from his native tongue and a unique perspective on the strange ways of earthlings. Grok was quickly adopted by the youth culture of America and has since peppered the vernacular of those who grok it” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grok).

Born and raised in Missouri, Robert Heinlein enlisted in the National Guard in 1924 when he was just 16 years old. In 1925, he enrolled in the Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD. “Heinlein’s experience in the U.S. Navy exerted a strong influence on his character and writing. In 1929, he graduated from the Naval Academy with the equivalent of a bachelor of arts in engineering. (At that time, the Academy did not confer degrees.) He ranked fifth in his class academically but with a class standing of 20th of 243 due to disciplinary demerits” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein).

He was discharged in 1934 for health reasons, and for a while he struggled financially. He finally turned to writing and published his first short story, “Life-Line,” in Astounding Science Fiction, which was edited at the time by the now-famous John W. Campbell, one of the leaders of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. During World War II, he worked for the Navy in the Civil Service in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. He worked there with Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp, two other icons of that Golden Age.

Stranger in a Strange Land came out in 1961; it’s considered the first novel of Heinlein’s middle period, a time when he grew out of his young socialist period into a libertarian period: “From about 1961 (Stranger in a Strange Land) to 1973 (Time Enough for Love), Heinlein explored some of his most important themes, such as individualism, libertarianism, and free expression of physical and emotional love. Three novels from this period, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Time Enough for Love, won the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, designed to honor classic libertarian fiction. Jeff Riggenbach described The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as ‘unquestionably one of the three or four most influential libertarian novels of the last century’” (ibid.).

In addition to introducing the world to Valentine Michael Smith, the Martian-born human and the Church of All Worlds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_All_Worlds), Heinlein introduced the word grok: “The word ‘grok’, coined in the novel, made its way into the English language. In Heinlein’s invented Martian language, ‘grok’ literally means ‘to drink’ and figuratively means ‘to comprehend’, ‘to love’, and ‘to be one with’. The word rapidly became common parlance among science fiction fans, hippies, and later computer programmersand hackers, and has since entered the Oxford English Dictionary” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land).

In fact, rather than being obsolete, it has become the name of an AI chatbot “developed by xAI. It was launched in November 2023 by Elon Musk as an initiative based on the large language model (LLM) of the same name. Grok has apps for iOS and Android and is integrated with the X social network and Tesla’s Optimus robot” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_(chatbot)), although from I have seen in various news reports, the AI chatbot doesn’t always understand what it is being asked.

Today’s image is from a review of Stranger in a Strange Land (https://mapupa.com/stranger-in-a-strange-land/). Does the man in the image look at all like Elon Musk?