Ursine usages with edifying footnote on Burma

[Charles Doyle]

Isn't the most prevalent current sense of the adjective "grizzly" (other than the ursine epithet) something like "ghastly, grim, horrible"--for instance, "I saw a really grizzly wreck on the interstate this morning"?  That sense has no entry in the OED, though it may be implied in an 1864 quotation (illustrating "grizzly" a.1): ". . . the next town,.. grim and grizzly,..looked drearier."

Could that sense have evolved, by a sort of folk etymology, from the legendary ferocity and destructiveness of the grizzly bear?  Or, was the sense already established--connotatively, at least--perhaps influencing the designation of the fierce animals when English speakers discovered them in the early 19th century (they could, instead, have been called "silvery bears" or something)?

--Charlie
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---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2006 11:19:31 -0700
>From: Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>
>Subject: Ursine usages with edifying footnote on Burma
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>According to a naturalist in Juneau, whose name I naturally didn't get, there's no "real difference" between the grizzly bear and the Alaska brown bear. "If they're on an island or coastal, we call them 'brown bears.' If they're on land, we call them 'grizzlies.' "
>
>  Use of the name "grizzly" as the unique and proper designation of _Ursus arctos horribilis_ seems to be a term of zoological art rather than common usage; the OED advises that _grizzly_ descends from "grizzled."  Yet a greyish or silvery "blond" is a color variation of the common "black bear" (_Ursus americanus_). According to the caption beneath the mounted specimen at Juneau International Airport, _black bears_ of this description are popularly referred to as "glacier bears" (not in OED).   Yet their color is exactly what many of us associtate with the typical grizzly (also called the "silvertip").
>
>  Am sure there is more of interest to say on this entiresubject, but that's all I know at the moment, except that Admiralty Island is home to the tiny (human) settlement of Angoon* as well as about 1700 _horribilis_,  making for the world's highest concentration of _grizzly bears_ and lowest human-to-grizzly-bear ratio.
>
>  JL

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