Real-world GRC: Is ISC2 wrong to treat Risk Appetite and Risk Tolerance as synonyms?

I'm reading through ISC2's official CGRC textbook and hit a section that raised an eyebrow:

Setting aside what an exam wants us to memorize, treat them as identical in the real world feels completely off.

In my mind, using personal analogies highlights why they aren't the same:

• Appetite (Desire & Capacity): Like food—what you want to eat, your craving, and how hungry you are at a given moment. In business, this feels like an organization’s active drive for growth and what kind of risk they are hungry to take on.
• Tolerance (Limits & Pain): Like pain tolerance—a very specific, baseline threshold for how much discomfort or stress an individual (or org) can physically endure before something breaks. In business, this feels like the operational guardrail or budget limit—the point past which a risk is simply unmanageable.

To me, appetite is about drive and desire, while tolerance is about surviving the pain when things go wrong.

1. How do you define and separate these two terms in your day-to-day operations?
2. When communicating with executive leadership, do you find pushing this distinction actually helps, or do executives just treat them as buzzword synonyms anyway?

Peace.