3 ms·

"grok" is defined as "comprehend the dynamics of" which I'm not sure you meant.

• shkkmo 6y ago
  That is a rather impoverished explanation of a complicated word. A closer description would be "to understand something on such a deep and personal level that the lines of identity between it and you blur." Here's a passage from the book that coined the term (as a word from an alien language) > Grok means "to understand," of course, but Dr. Mahmoud, who might be termed the leading Terran expert on Martians, explains that it also means, "to drink" and "a hundred other English words, words which we think of as antithetical concepts. 'Grok' means all of these. It means 'fear,' it means 'love,' it means 'hate'—proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot hate anything unless you grok it, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you—then you can hate it. By hating yourself. But this implies that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate—and (I think) Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called mild distaste.
  • uoaei 6y ago
    The complexities of the word have been lost as the English language continues to evolve, until the colloquial understanding supplants the literal origins. We exist at a particular moment in time, and language is a tool that is used to be understood. If one wishes to use arcane and literal etymologically-derived definitions of words, it is necessary to say so.
  • ikura 6y ago
    Woah, I always thought it came from the unix utility's name - but never thought to wonder why the utility was named the way it was!
• autokad 6y ago
  good point, I didn't use it correctly