"Grizzly" vs. "grisly": a whole 'nother animal

I copyedit a lot of allegedly scary books and read a lot of true crime so this one comes up a lot. People are writing the word “grizzly” to describe something that is gruesome or terrifyingly gross. The word for that is “grisly,” which means “1) inspiring horror or intense fear 2) inspiring disgust or distaste.”

A “grizzly” is a type of fucking enormous brown bear that you want to stay the fuck away from, except when it’s Big Ben from the 1970s get-away-from-it-all TV show The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, and then you can keep him as a pet. You could also keep a Native American man as a pet on that show. How this would go over in real life I can easily imagine.

In real life this mutha would be getting filleted like a wild-caught salmon.

So if you are describing a crime scene or a haunted house as a grizzly one, make sure that it is a crime scene or haunted house that predominantly features a roaring, skull-crushing brown bear about eight feet tall.

I had a boyfriend who persistently referred to a friend of his as “grizzled.” From this I concluded that the friend was a slightly grumpy older man or a man with graying hair. When I asked my boyfriend about it he said that no, it was a younger man. When I asked him what he thought “grizzled” meant he sheepishly confessed that he didn’t know. He had similar problems with the word “glib,” which he used in a manner to describe any number of ways of speaking except for “nonchalant, offhand, or superficial.” When questioned he timidly suggested that it meant “negative.” I will not say this is why I broke up with him, but it certainly didn’t help.