GROK THIS!!

[Chris Torek]

>In article <767 at quintus.UUCP> ok at quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>>To quote the book "'grok' means 'drink'".  (Hence "absorb completely".)

Actually, the `absorb completely' explanation is a bit off.  According
to hints carefully never quite stated in the story, water has almost a
religious significance to the Martians.  The two meanings of `grok'
(understand/drink) amount to the connotational and denotational
differences to (e.g.) the English word `love' or `sex'.

>>In fact the word PREDATES Heinlein's book.  I forget the author & title ....

In article <1803 at scolex> brianm at sco.COM (Brian Moffet) writes:
>The book was "Red Planet" by Robert A. Heinlein.  Heinlein was
>very careful to keep his planet cultures the same through all of his
>books.  Any way, this topiuc doesn't really belong in this group
>anymore.  

I had only read Red Planet at most three times, but this did not
agree with what I remembered, so I reread it last night.  While the
sharing of the water of life and the (related) growing-together do
occur in the book, nowhere does it use the word `grok'.  The only
Martian words that appear are proper names (Gekko, K'boomch).

Just to `legitimise' this message: the C `grok' flag, of course, uses
the denotational meaning and causes the computer to drink the source,
whereupon it disappears completely.  (The flag is supplied with DWIM
mode on Lisp machines.  They figure you should not be feeding C code
in in the first place.)          :-)
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163)
Domain:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris