I love desserts. All kinds of desserts — pie, cake, ice cream, even the occasional Baked Alaska. I’ve tasted all kinds of sweets, but never the “dry, tumbleweed-filled dessert” mentioned on Yahoo! Style. It sounds like the kind of thing you’d find in the American Southwest:
What makes some footwear a dessert boot? Is it chocolate brown? Caramel colored? Mint green? Yahoo! Style description of suede dessert boots is positively yummy, although I think the boots would be more suitable to a hot, dry desert than a dessert table:
What dessert do you think Johnny Depp found in the desert? My favorite cookie, Pecan Sandies? Or Lorna Dunes? Maybe the writer/editor for Yahoo! Style knows:
What desert has its own holiday? The Gobi? The Sahara? The Mojave? Yahoo! News doesn’t tell us, just teases with this hint of a desert:
Ms. Hoskins seems to think it’s National Pie Day, which makes no sense since pie is a dessert.
What desert could a baker make into the shape of a book?
Is it possible that the Yahoo! News writer meant dessert? As I learned from Miss Sampson in third grade: Dessert has two S’s because you want more dessert. I wonder what this writer learned in third grade.
What makes a boot a “dessert boot”? Is it chocolate brown suede? Is it the inability to spell by a Yahoo! Style writer?
Here’s one expression on Yahoo! News that you’ll never get right:
The correct expression is just deserts. The word deserts (which is pronounced like desserts) means “something deserved.” But I guarantee you, that if the writer had used just deserts, some reader would claim it is wrong. Regardless of the spelling you use, someone will think it’s wrong.
The solution: Avoid using this expression. Do not use it. Never, ever write just deserts or just desserts.
Which desert would that be? The Sahara? Gobi? Mojave? No, that would be a misspelling of dessert on Yahoo! Travel:
As I learned in third grade: You want more dessert, so give dessert more letters (actually, one letter more) than desert.
Yum. Who wouldn’t like a dinner that included salad, filet mignon, and a pile of sand? That’s the meal that was served to homeless people, according to Yahoo! News:
Maybe the writer was thinking back to that old TV commercial with the slogan “Nobody doesn’t like Sahara Lee.”
How much chocolate frosting do you need to spread around a desert? I guess that depends on the desert. At 3,600,000 square miles, the Sahara is one large (and hot) desert. I imagine you’d need more than a few truckloads of Betty Crocker’s Rich and Creamy Chocolate Frosting to do the job right. I know! Let’s ask the “journalist” from Yahoo! News what he thinks:
Didn’t we all learn in the third grade that the course that comes at the end of a meal is a dessert? It has two S’s. You can remember that using the handy mnemonic Miss Sampson drilled into our heads: Dessert has two S’s because you want more of it than a desert.
Terribly Write 