Grisly ***

grisly







Y

D



–adjective

1. causing a shudder 

or 

feeling of horror; horrible; gruesome: a grisly murder.  



2. formidable; grim: a grisly countenance.  





C



grisly, gristly, grizzled (adjs.), grizzly (adj., n.) 

 

Grisly means "horrible, gruesome": The scene of the shootout was grisly enough to satisfy the most bloodthirsty. 



Gristly can be a dialectal homophone of grisly, but it is based on the word gristle and simply means "containing or characterized by gristle," so that it is usually pronounced: My steak was very gristly. 



Grizzled and grizzly both mean "gray, graying, or partly gray," especially "gray-haired" and so by extension "old or at least more than mature," although grizzled is much more frequently used: The old man’s hair and beard were long and grizzly [grizzled]. 



And so a grizzly bear (or grizzly) is so named not because it is horrible but because its coat is grizzled or grayish. All these are Standard.





　

Given this attitude, it might seem strange that "Le Petit Soldat" is funny. But it is, for long stretches. And usually the laughs are grisly; we wince at the same time. Godard understands how funny the automobile is, for example. No other director gets so much humor out of the way we identify our cars with our egos (remember the opening scenes of "Weekend"?). 



He gives us a chase in which the hero, trying to kill the driver of another car, is constantly stymied by oncoming traffic. And the other car is one of those dumpy late-1950s compact Nashes, referred to by brand name. Somehow you get the feeling you've wandered into a Raymond Chandler novel.





flabbergast

aghast

They [stood] aghast at the sight of the plane crashing.  

rudder

shudder

does anyone remember when Brolin was still cavorting [around] in films like Hollow Man? I do *shudder*

Haneke seemed to suggest that recent cinema has cheapened such [slaking] of emotion into a near-pornographic fake: we are crazed and cheered by [shuddering] events that have no authentic claim upon our feelings.

Detest