[LETTERS to the editor]Get the basics right, first

The writer of a recent restaurant review in your paper (“A Pinch of Scandal with a Dash of Shin”) seemed to go to great effort to correctly spell the name of an Italian wine (Donnafugatta), French terms such as amuse bouche, prix fixe, foie gras and escargot, and even Romanized versions of Korean words such as jaebeol, meaning “conglomerate.”
So it was somewhat distasteful to find that he failed to properly use the correct one between two plain-vanilla English words with distinctly different meanings: desert and dessert. Unfortunately, the writer’s lavish sprinkling of this mispelled word “desert” rather than “dessert” throughout the review put a damper on what was an otherwise delectable review.
Perhaps it’s time for the English-language JoongAng Daily to bone up on the old Mother Tongue and go easy on the foreign ingredients.
Michael Flaherty, Yongsan, Seoul