Stranger in a Strange Land

its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it. Nobody tried to stop this process, the way some languages are policed and have official limits . . probably because there never has been, truly, such a thing as 'the King's English'-for 'the King's English' was French. English was in truth a bastard tongue and nobody cared how it grew . . . and it did!-enormously. Until no one could hope to be an educated man unless he did his best to embrace this monster.
                "Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language. It almost drove me crazy . . . until I learned to think in it-and that put a new 'map' of the world on top of the one I grew up with. A better one, in many ways-certainly a more detailed one.
                "But nevertheless there are things which can be said in the simple Arabic tongue that cannot be said in English."
                Jubal nodded agreement. "Quite true. That's why I've kept up my reading of it, a little."
                "Yes. But the Martian language is so much more complex than is English-and so wildly different in the fashion in which it abstracts its picture of the universe-that English and Arabic might as well be considered one and the same language, by comparison. An Englishman and an Arab can learn to think each other's thoughts, in the other's language. But I'm not certain that it will ever be possible for us to think in Martian (other than by the unique fashion Mike learned it)-oh, we can learn a sort of a 'pidgin' Martian, yes-that is what I speak.
                "Now take this one word: 'grok.' Its literal meaning, one which I suspect goes back to the origin of the Martian race as thinking, speaking creatures-and which throws light on their whole 'map'-is quite easy. 'Grok' means 'to drink.'"
                "Huh?" said Jubal. "But Mike never says 'grok' when he's just talking about drinking. He-"
                "Just a moment." Mahmoud spoke to Mike in Martian.
                Mike looked faintly surprised and said, "'Grok' is drink," and dropped the matter.
                "But Mike would also have agreed," Mahmoud went on, "if I had named a hundred other English words, words which represent what we think of as different concepts, even pairs of antithetical concepts. And 'grok' means all of these, depending on how you use it. It means 'fear,' it means 'love,' it means 'hate'-proper hate, for by the Martian 'map' you cannot possibly hate anything unless you grok it completely, understand it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you-then and only then can you hate it. By hating yourse1f~ But this also implies, by necessity, that you love it, too, and cherish it and would not have it otherwise. Then you can hate- and (I think) that Martian hate is an emotion so black that the nearest human equivalent could only be called a mild distaste."
                Mahmoud screwed up his face. "It means 'identically equal' in the mathematical sense. The human cliché, 'This hurts me worse than it does you' has a Martian flavor to it, if only a trace. The Martians seem to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that the observer interacts with the observed simply through the process of observation. 'Grok' means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the process being observed-to merge, to blend, to intermarry, to lose personal identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science-and it means as little to us as color means to a blind man." Mahmoud paused. "Jubal, if I chopped you up and made a Stew of you, you and the stew, whatever else was in it, would grok-and when I ate you, we would grok together and nothing would be lost and it would not matter which one of us did the chopping up and eating."
                "It would to me!" Jubal said firmly.
                "You aren't a Martian." Mahmoud stopped again to talk to Mike in Martian.
                Mike nodded. "You spoke rightly, my brother Dr. Mahmoud. I am been saying so. Thou art God."
                Mahmoud shrugged helplessly. "You see how hopeless it is? All I got was