Ursine usages with edifying footnote on Burma

[Jonathan Lighter]

Evidently the grayish-blondish color in question does frequently appear in _horribilis_ :

  "Grizzlies vary widely in body shape, colour and in the shape of their heads. The tundra grizzly is often creamy yellow on the back with brownish legs and underparts. In the Rocky Mountains, the 'silver-tip' phase is dominant." [http://raysweb.net/wildlife/pages/04.html]

  What this seems to mean is that in nonscientific (i.e., original and popular) usage, both {grizzly bear} and {grisly bear} may refer to either _horribilis_ in any color, make, or model or the American black bear in its "grizzled" variety.

  In either spelling, popular usage presumably could refer to any very large, very ferocious individual bear (other than the unmistakable polar bear or, perhaps, the black "black bear") seen in the North American West, including Alaska, as well as in other northern climes.

   JL

Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
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Poster: Charles Doyle
Subject: Re: Ursine usages with edifying footnote on Burma
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In fact, so many early (and later) instances of "grisly" refer to persons, other beings, or scenes that are old, pale, spectral, dim, or (in the case of the 1788 elephant!) GRAY, I wonder if "grizzly" ('gray') wasn't already influencing the use and perception of the etymologically unrelated "grisly" ('horrid, causing an onlooker to tremble') long ago.

Take, for instance, the OED's 1551 quotation at "grisly," from Ralph Robinson's translaiton of More's Utopia. (I have expanded the quotation): "But a certain friar, . . . a man of grisly and stern gravity, began merrily and wantonly to jest and taunt." The narrator is comically ridiculing the friar, whose merry jesting and taunting hardly reveal him to be HORRID or TERRIFYING; we may more easily envision him, merely, as being old and GRAY.

(All that, obviously, by way of rationalizing my unawareness that "grizzly" and "grisly" are separate words! And, yes, historically each lexeme has been spelled both ways.)

--Charlie
________________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2006 15:28:10 -0700
>From: Jonathan Lighter
>Subject: Re: Ursine usages with edifying footnote on Burma
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>
>Me too. Perhaps the bear was indeed originally a _*grisly bear_ ; OED provides an elephant described as "grisly" in 1788.
>
> No very early cites supporting this usage are to hand, however, and OED, for reasons unknown, does not mention "grisly" in its "grizzly" entry. Dickens mentions a "grisly bear" in _Household Words_, perhaps under the influence of Longfellow's "The Skeleton in Armor" (1842); that "grisly bear," however, is located on the Baltic, an indication that Longfellow was a little hazy on grizzlies.
>
> Whatever the case, grayish-blondish bears appear to be those that typify the "grizzly bear" to nonspecialists of the lower 48, plus Hawai'i, today. I don't know if this color variation turns up in _U. a. horribilis_. It would be nice if it did, though.
>
> JL


>sagehen wrote:
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>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: sagehen
>Subject: Re: Ursine usages with edifying footnote on Burma
>------------------------------------------------------------
>
>>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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