Letters

What’s the Word?

“The boat chugged away, leaving them alone on a desert island,” reads the headline on your article (“Stranded,” Sept. 5). But the story describes a few days spent by a man and wife on an island that is anything but a desert.

The term desert island is completely erroneous, for such a horror would consist of a sandbar on which nothing grows at all, and there would be no water that was potable. Life could be sustained only by eating what fish one could catch with one’s hands.

I know it is usual for people to say desert island when what they mean is tropical island , but can you tell me of anyone who was ever wrecked on a “desert” and lived to tell about it?

JACK P. GABRIEL, Carson