Ursine usages with edifying footnote on Burma

[Charles Doyle]

Well, I'll be damned!  I was the one doing the folk etymologizing!  I do believe, though, that (especially among those of us who don't spell well) the two words have partly converged, semantically as well as phonologically (but NOT, evidently, orthographically!).  Few people nowadays, I believe--except maybe in the Pacific Northwest--think of grizzly bears as GRAY; we think of them as GRISLY (my newly discovered word!).

--Charlie
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---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2006 15:45:43 -0400
>From: sagehen <sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM>
>Subject: Re: Ursine usages with edifying footnote on Burma
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>
>>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
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>Am I missing something here?  It looks like a simple misspelling for "grisly."
>
>The ursine grizzly is called that just because of  its color, not its
>nature.  (My family once had a cat named "Grizzle" for the same reason.)
>AM
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org