Eric Felton, The Wall Street Journal

March 29, 2009

Eric Felton
The Wall Street Journal
200 Liberty Street
New York, New York

RE: How’s Your Drink, language, and those words mean whatever I want them to mean. A comment on your column of Saturday, March 29, 2009.

Mr. Felton,

First, let me congratulate you for, inter alia, bringing me back to Gin & Tonics. It was a marvelous column of forgotten joys of sunny afternoons pool side.

Second, what the Hell were you thinking when you included the following lines

“If only Chandler had thought to change some
ugly racial caricatures in his rewrite…”

in your delightful column on Whiskey Sours?

I think the ending of King Lear is too upsetting. Let’s rewrite that one.

Likewise for the last scene of Hamlet. Can you imagine if Sam Peckinpah or Quentin Tarantino had filmed it? Nunnery, as when Hamlet tells Ophelia “Get thee to a Nunnery”, means whorehouse. Shouldn’t that go too?

A Nobel Prize winner wrote a book titled “The Dreaded N Word of the Narcissus”. The “dreaded ‘N’ word” is the word that White men dare not use. Dick Gregory titled his autobiography “Nigger”. What gives?

We probably shouldn’t use any of your drinks while reading Huckleberry Finn, should we?

Wetting your whistle doesn’t mean swallowing your tongue.