I Grue Up and Threw Up

Reading is always a source of new words for me, and there are a couple of words that are a good follow up to a trip to Alaska: grizzly and grisly. And if you get too close to a grizzly, grue and gruesome.

Grizzly (although in a book of the collected letters of S. J. Perlman it was spelled grizzlie) is an adjective that means gray, gray-haired or hoary. It has been used as an adjective in English since the 1590s, and only became a noun (part of the grizzly bear name) in 1807.

The bear was likely originally described as grizzly because the tips of its hair appear gray or gold. As a noun grizzly now refers to the species is known as the ursus arctos ssp of the brown bear family, and another rung down the species ladder are four kinds of ursus arctos ssp: the Kodiak, the peninsula grizzly, the Mexican grizzly, and the California grizzly.

The California grizzly, or ursus horribilis, was named by George Ord in either a pun or ignorance of the difference between grizzly and grisly. Ursus horribilis is the bear that is on the California state flag. The last wild California grizzly in captivity was captured for William Randolph Hearst in 1889 and lived out its life with the name of “Monarch” in the zoo in San Francisco. Monarch was the model for the bear on the California flag. Monarch died in 1911, the same year the flag was officially adopted.

Grisly is a different word, not a different spelling of grizzly. It is the word used for horror movies or murder mysteries. A grisly murder is one that causes one to shudder or feel horror, although its secondary meaning is less severe: if you are grim or formidable you can also be grisly (usually, it seems, used of old men). The word comes from the Old English word grislic, which meant horrible or dreadful. You can find similar words in Old Frisian, Middle Dutch, Dutch, German, and High German, but its source to Old English is unknown. So while grizzlies may be grisly and gruesome, they are also grizzly.

Gruesome is a common word, defined as that which is grisly, causes great horror, or is horribly repugnant. Gruesome, the adjective form, has been used since the 1560s. It is not defined as something full of grue, though it could be. Unlike many words (see Be Ept, Some Abraham Lincoln, and Ravenous but not Rapacious) gruesome actually means full of grue.

Grue is now (according to dictionary.com) chiefly a Scottish word, but is a verb that means to shudder. It came to modern English from the Middle English word gruen sometime around 1300. Like grisly, its etymology is uncertain and there are cognates in Middle Dutch, Middle Low german, and Scandinavian. Etymology.com says it is “one of the many Scottish words popularized in England by Scott’s novels.”

So it is not necessarily a bad thing to be grizzly, unless you encounter a bear by that name. And if you want to encounter something grisly or gruesome, go to a horror movie and be prepared to grue.