Ok.
Say in some weird psychic occurrence you fell off a cruise ship.
You grabbed an igloo floating by.
And got washed up on a beach.
It’s a island. Just randomly close enough. No one is on this island.
Just lots of sand.
Is the island deserted because every one left?
Or is it a desert? Like, no water.
So deserted.
Because of the winds of Araby. Or whatever weather phenomenon causes deserts to be deserted.
You get my drift?
(And desserts because I want one.)
A desert island is a deserted island, not a sandy island.
Also, when someone is given their “Just Deserts” it is Justified and Deserved.
Desserted should be a word.
And the dry sandy places are called “deserts” because (almost) no one lives there.
However there are millions of Fremen living in the sandy wastes of Arrakis. Can we still call it a desert?
Hmm, I don’t think I knew this, but it makes sense. Now I’m wondering if a desert (deserted) island could also be a desert (place with arid climate). It seems to me islands, being surrounded by water, would tend toward the humid, but I’m not sure.
P.S. Out of curiosity, I looked up Mount Desert Island, home to Bar Harbor, ME. It was apparently named that because the mountains were bare of vegetation.
P.P.S. I’m pretty sure that’s an iceberg, not an igloo, that we glommed onto. Good news for the Inuit!
If you got clobbered with an apple pie a la mode, did you get creamed?
~VOW
If it had some bourbon or maybe brandy mixed in, you might get pie-eyed.
I agree. “We lunched at Applebee’s, then desserted at Dairy Queen.”
Bahrain (island) and Qatar (peninsula) are mostly sandy desert. Google tells me the current humidity is 85% in Bahrain, and 80% in Qatar .
Igloo, like in beer cooler. Silly.
Not someones home.
Oh, I knew it was a beer cooler. I was just imagining it as an Iceberg™ beer cooler. 
Igloos aren’t homes, anyway. They’re temporary hunting shelters.
Yes, that checks out. Wikipedia describes Bahrain as having an arid climate and also as being extremely humid. I would have said that was impossible and now my head hurts with trying to reconcile it. I’m going to go take temporary shelter in a beer cooler.
See what I mean
You think on it long enough it starts hurting the old melon.
Welcome to my life.
I suggest a desert can be defined as having little or no rainfall.
That would allow for humid, sandy areas.
The odd thing is that I didn’t think it was that bad – 115F in the Gulf didn’t bother me near as much as 85F does here in the States.
Yes, that’s what it must be, but I just don’t get how. Sand is generally not great at holding heat, which is why deserts are famous for getting cold very quickly at night. If it’s 115 °F and 80% humidity, that means the dew point is like 107 °F. How is it not raining?
(Answer: I don’t know as much as I think I know.)
A desert is defined as an area that gets very little (<10 inches a year) precipitation. The largest desert on the planet is Antarctica. (The Sahara is the hottest)
@SCAdian - do you know what the local time in those places were?
You mean these?
I posted that at 1808 Eastern; they’re eight hours ahead of us, so that would have been 0208.
It’s misting in Qatar now, but it will dry out when the sun’s been up a couple of hours