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Grok
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I read through a lot of blogs in a given day, racing through RSSOwl, my feed reader of preference. Some I read to find a good item for our OSBI (Open Source Business Intelligence) Daily. Some to keep abreast of the what's happening to enable the TeleInterActive Lifestyle. And some for personal edification.
I was amazed today as to how often I came across someone using the word "grok". I've been happily seeing more adoption of this word, but today it seemed nearly every blog, article or news item I read had the word "grok" at least once.
It was always used correctly: "to fully and deeply understand"; but I can't help but wonder how many of the authors using "grok" grokked the word's origins. It's Martian and not from any Terran language at all. It comes from the fertile mind of Robert A. Heinlein, and was brought to Earth by Valentine Michael Smith in Heinlein's wonderful 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land.
The word "grok" is only poorly understood by us earthbound folk, as it is deeply related to the Martian religious practice of eating their dead while overseen by the spirit of the newly departed. Here's the best explanation I can find in the novel.
"... a Martian dies when he decides to die, having discussed it with and advised by his friends and having received the consent of his ancestors' ghosts to join them... One second he is alive and well, the next second he's a ghost with a dead body left over... his closest friends eat what he no longer has any use for, 'grokking' him, as Mike would say, and praising his virtues as they spread the mustard. The new ghost attends the feast himself... by which [ceremony] the ghost attains the status of 'Old One'..."
-- Jubal explaining to Duke, chapter xiii, in Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
Here's some of the places I've enountered "grok" today.
- Microsoft supports OpenID by Marc Canter
- The Megapixel Myth - You’re getting ripped off by Don MacAskill
- Yahoo’s Pipes Hard to Grok But Snazzy by Jackson West in GigaOm
- Fonality: Dialing the future by Matt Asay
- Mixed Japanese stuff by Gianugo Rabellino
And more, for a total of 23 different blog posts. I do hope they remembered the mustard, and used a good quality one like Sierra Nevada stout & stone ground. 
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InterActive Systems & Consulting, Inc. (IASC) performs research in the areas of data analytics, collaboration and remote access.
InterASC Professional Services, a service mark of IASC, provides strategic consulting and project management for data warehousing, business intelligence and collaboration projects using proprietary and open source solutions. We formulate vendor-independent strategies and implement solutions for information management in an increasingly complex and distributed business environment, allowing secure data analysis and collaboration that provides enterprise information in the most valuable form to the right person, whenever and wherever needed.
TeleInterActive Networks, a service mark of IASC, hosts open source applications for small and medium enterprises including CMS, blogs, wikis, database applications, portals and mobile access. We provide the tools for SME to put their customer at the center of their business, and leverage information management in a way previously reserved for larger organizations.
