grok
From Robert A. Heinlein's classic SF novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, where the main character, Michael Valentine Smith, an alien, teaches those on Earth to grok as a way of absorbing and understanding something, or someone.
from Bartleby's and The American Heritage Dictionary:
grok
PRONUNCIATION: grk
TRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected forms: grok·ked, grok·king, groks
Slang To understand profoundly through intuition or empathy.
ETYMOLOGY: Coined by Robert A. Heinlein in his Stranger in a Strange Land.
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Also: uptight, stoned, bad trip, keep on truckin', bad vibes, good vibes, cool it, spaced out
burn-out (as in, he's a real burn-out): this expression is an interesting study of the social mores among the younger folks of the time...it meant someone who stayed high all the time, usually using a vast array of drugs. It's semantic value is now difficult to explain if you weren't there, because most folks partied to a degree, even if just experimenting with pot, but nobody wanted to be a burn-out except for the burn-outs. Yet, there was no derision in the term, just a mild distancing...it wasn't really cool to be a burn-out, but burn-outs maintained their own cool and mystique in a strange sort of way and intermingled and partied with everybody else. But you would hear folks say things like, "Man, I ain't no burn-out!" Or, "I ain't doing that [drug], I ain't no burn-out." Or, "What are ya, some kind of burn-out!" And these were always accompanied with a laugh and/or a smile, and a definite twinkle in the eye.
Then "burned-out" also came to mean overextending your energy somewhere in the 70's.
And, then, of course, "burned-out" or "all burned-out" [on drugs] came to take on a more ominous tone as more peoples' lives began to shipwreck on substance abuse in the 70's.
