"dire choice" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
You can use it to refer to an unpleasant or unfavorable situation that requires a difficult decision, or a choice between two unpleasant alternatives. For example, "Facing financial bankruptcy, she was left with a dire choice between selling her home or giving up her beloved job."
It's a pretty dire choice.
But we're getting sidetracked... Alfred E. Neuman is faced with a dire choice, the same choice we're all afflicted by.
For instance, when the U.N. World Food Program announced in December that it was suspending aid because of unfulfilled donor commitments, Syrian refugees faced the dire choice of going hungry or returning to a war zone.
Activists and analysts with strong connections to areas now under Islamic State control say they are increasingly hearing stories about how economic hardship has pushed families to make a dire choice: poverty, escape or joining the militant group. .
For starters, it emphasized that reducing carbon emissions was critical to keeping the United States from having to make dire choices in the future.
Most days, and most hours, the dire choices faced by many drivers on the B.Q.E. are these: Bad, worse and no exit.
But, in 1940, Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union, leaving Milosz with two equally dire choices: remain, and live under Stalinism; or return to Warsaw, and live under Nazism.
Clever Raphael Behr has a Guardian column today arguing that electoral reform – voters rejected it in the 2011 referendum – is the answer, though when I look at the grand-coalition politics so common in Germany or the dire choices facing Israel in its coming election I do wonder why.
But for those Australians set to lose between $4.40 and $7.05 a week in one of the 45th parliament's first legislative acts, many of them living below the poverty line, those small sums will make the dire choices of subsistence budgeting even more desperate.
Budget experts say the state's current fiscal problems are not yet as severe as in 2003, but they warn that if Albany does not move quickly and aggressively to address them, the state could face the same sort of dire choices it confronted five years ago.
Our businesses are facing dire choices- between being able to reinvest profits into the future of our businesses and meeting the ever-growing costs of health care coverage; between denying our employees coverage for needed medical services and having to cut their jobs entirely.
