In her March 7 column, "One Night Stand-Off," Faran Krentcil does a wonderful job of describing the very real issues of protocol faced by young adults after they grope one another in the dark after too much beer. I must confess that, even though I was an altar boy for some time in the early 90s, I was delighted by her sleazy tales! It was like the poor man's Decameron. Then I came upon this passage, in which Krentcil talks about how strange it is for a young woman to get naked with a young man and then not have him say hello to her after their shared buffness: "But 'hello' isn't a marriage proposal. It's saying you're not embarrassed. It means you had a good time, and that we didn't look fat in our Furla thong."
More disturbing than the use of a plural possessive in front of "Furla thong" is the fact that Furla doesn't make thongs. They make leather handbags and "accessories," which, a young man at its Soho store here in New York just told me, means "other cute stuff."
If a young woman feels that she looks fat in her Furla thong, it is because she has mistaken her leather wallet or purse for underwear. If I endeavored to wear my wallet as a loincloth, I would probably be similarly dissatisfied. Krentcil is a talented writer in desperate need of a good fact checker.
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