More commonly confused words

Grizzly/ grisly / gristly

The noun grizzly is a short term for the grizzly bear, a large brown bear found in North America. Male grizzlies have an average weight of up to 400 kilos. The adjective grisly means scary or horrifying or terrible, like a horror movie that is offensive. The adjective gristly means to contain gristle, or cartilage in meat. Gristle is a kind of connective tissue in animal ligaments that is very tough, and a bad serving of beef may have too much gristle if it is too tough to chew. All of these words, grizzly, grisly, and gristly, sound quite similar, although only grizzly and grisly are pronounced exactly the same. Gristly sounds slightly different when it is pronounced correctly, more like gristle-eeee instead of grizz-lee. Sometimes restaurants and other businesses use the word grizzly to make customers imagine a bear, for example the appetite of a bear. No restaurant would want to use the adjective gristly to describe its products. Here are some usage examples to help keep these words apart:

• In 2012 and 2013, Hong Kong Disneyland introduced three new activities, namely Toy Story, Grizzly Gulch, and Mystic Point.
• At I+D Style Cafe in the Another Alternative Store on the first floor of Siam Center, other tempting dishes are Toasty Glazed (Bt260), a croissant stuffed with smoked ham, bacon and an onsen egg on a bed of mixed salad with spicy maple sauce, and the Grizzly (Bt280), a toasted baguette with smoked sausage, mixed salad with truffle honey sauce and a fried egg.
• The endangered Mekong giant catfish can be as big as a grizzly bear.
• Malabon Zoo owner Manny Tangco feeds a grizzly bear named Justin Bebear and Pacquiao the orangutan.
• Grizzly People is a grassroots organization devoted to preserving bears and their wilderness.
• Fast food giant McDonald’s said Monday it was aware of a New Zealand woman’s allegation she found a half-eaten cockroach in a hamburger bought at one of its South Island restaurants. Annah Sophia Stevenson told Fairfax New Zealand that she bought a Big Mac meal on Saturday night then found the cockroach when she was back at home and part-way through eating the burger. “I was trying to squeeze my teeth through it. I was chewing on that thing for a while. I thought it was a bit of gristly meat.”
• Dining Out on Beef: From Gristly Filets to Fair Steaks.
• A hot pot lamb special was watery and thin and came with big chunks of carrots, cabbage and gristly meat on the bone.
• Australian bushfires leave grisly trail of environmental damage.
• Australian bowling spearhead Mitchell Starc says he is focused on being ready for the first Test against South Africa after declaring himself available for selection following a grisly training accident.
• Tim LaHaye Dies at 90; Fundamentalist Leader’s Grisly Novels Sold Millions.
• Argentinian film-maker Pablo Trapero lands a sledgehammer punch with this terrifically well-made, but grisly movie.
• Movie review: ‘Morgan’ goes from great to grisly in second half.
• Harry Styles bloodied and caked in mud as he shoots grisly scenes for WWII movie Dunkirk.
• Mel Gibson Reaches Toward Redemption with Grisly, Effective Hacksaw Ridge.

Decent / descent / dissent

The adjective decent means acceptable, proper, or appropriate. It can also mean good enough or up to a certain standard. The noun descent refers to moving downwards or declining. Sometimes we see the noun descent used to mean family origin. For example, some people in America may not be Thai, but they are of Thai descent. That means one or more of their ancestors were Thai. The noun dissent means disagreement or not going along with generally held opinions. Of the words decent, descent, and dissent, only two sound alike: descent and dissent. To tell descent and dissent apart, we may try to remember that dissent is similar in meaning to disagree, another word that also begins with the letters dis. If we have a choice of three words, then the one starting with the letters dis is the one meaning to disagree:

To dissent means to disagree.

To recall the meaning of the word descent, we can make up a sentence, such as

They stopped to smell the scent of the flowers on the descent from the mountaintop.

The sentence is about a group of friends and classmates who went hiking in the mountains during one holiday, and enjoyed the smell of flowers as they walked down the mountain. So if we link the word descent to the word scent or perfume, then we may associate it with the idea of walking downwards. That leaves the word decent. Again, an invented sentence may help us keep the word apart from others that look like it:

A decent person is worth much more than a cent.

The sentence tries to say that being decent is a good thing, and people who are decent are valuable to society. Here are some sample usages to help tell these words apart:

• High quality at a decent price is Capital Rice’s formula.
• Circumstances make it difficult for any of these blue-collar workers, especially those with children, to earn a decent living.
• Thailand will see a decent pick-up in growth next year after a difficult 2014, according to Adithep Vanabriksha, Chief Investment Officer at Aberdeen Asset Management Company Limited.
• So if you really love the Surface design but can’t afford the Pro model then it’s fine to get one. But since you can get a more powerful Intel Core series notebook at this price, I urge you to either get the Surface Pro 3 model or another decent laptop instead of this.
• He was wearing a decent suit and had an expensive gold watch on his wrist.
• Ladda Tammy Duckworth, the first US congresswoman of Thai descent, promised yesterday that she would do her best to establish closer ties between Thailand and the United States.
• Australian investigators say missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 was in a ‘high and increasing rate of descent’ when it vanished.
• England opener Alex Hales has been fined for showing dissent after confronting the third umpire following his first-innings dismissal in the fourth Test.
• Vaclav Havel’s spirit of creative dissent lives on in Tibet, Myanmar.
• ‘Hard’ erosion projects hit by wave of dissent.
• But the memo, filed in the U.S. State Department’s “dissent channel,” underscores the deep rifts and lingering frustration within the administration in Washington, D.C.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)