On Grizzly Scenes and Gristled Old Men

A grizzly (not gristly) bear 

in Anchorage, Alaska.

Photo by Shellie from Florida 

[CC-BY-2.0] via Wikimedia Commons. 

All editors have pet peeves, little errors that are so crazy-making we just can’t let them go. And by let them go I do not mean “choose not to fix them”; I mean something more like “unburn them from our retinas so we can go on to lead relatively normal lives.”

My pet peeves include the misuse and abuse of the words grizzly, gristly, and grizzled. I have lost track of the number of “grizzly” or “gristly” murder scenes, accident scenes, or battlefield scenes I’ve encountered. And somehow grizzled often becomes gristled, so we end up with “gristled” old men, old veterans, or what have you. Just yesterday in my online travels, I came across a video game site that promised “gristly” scenes in one of its products.

In case you’re wondering (and I hope to all that is holy that you are not), grizzly and gristly in the above examples should be grisly, and gristled should be grizzled. In general, a murder scene is not “somewhat gray” (dictionary definition of grizzly), “crowded with big bears” (my definition of grizzly), or “consisting of gristle” (dictionary definition of gristly). It is instead “grim and ghastly” (dictionary definition of grisly). Also in general, old men and old veterans, or at least their hair and beards, can be “sprinkled, streaked, or mixed with gray” (dictionary definition of grizzled), but they are less likely to be “covered in extraneous bits of cartilage” (my definition of gristled).

I don’t know why these particular problems make me bang my head on my desk in despair, but they do. I know I should learn to let go.

I had very nearly convinced myself to refuse to be bothered by these words any longer, but then while researching this post, I was reminded that Merriam-Webster Unbridged allows grizzly as a variant spelling of grisly. This peeves me in ways I prefer not to admit to, much less describe. Thanks a lot, dictionary.[1]

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[1] This in no way diminishes my love of dictionaries. I am still one of those weirdos who can spend a whole afternoon browsing words in a dictionary.