Cleaning Up Saved Posts

I'd saved this Gwenda Bond article to comment on last week; she deplores the use of coffee terms to describe people's skin-tones (for, I think, purely racial reasons -- I guess; it's hard to tell).

Well, if it makes you more politically correct to avoid saying someone's skin is "cafe au lait," more power to you, and I hope you enjoy that warm fuzzy feeling. But I think those descriptions are a bad idea for a completely different reason -- I don't drink coffee, never have, and so don't have a clue what you're saying. (Though I may possibly be alone in the Western world in that, which would ruin my argument somewhat.)

I know "black coffee" is black, and "cream-colored" is white, but anything else just reads like a line of Blackadder dialogue to me. [1] And good writing connects rather than confuses.


[1] "So, what you're telling me, Percy, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue than something else you have never seen."