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Does anyone (Grant, Martha included!) know whether the phrase "trapped on a desert island" is an incorrect usage of the phrase "trapped on a deserted island," or a correct phrase in and of itself? I see both forms used more or less equally, but to my way of thinking trapped on a desert island doesn't make much sense.
In cartoon pictures of desert islands there is often a couple of guys sitting on a small patch of sand under a single coconut tree. Even under those extreme circumstances they seem to have enough food and water to survive, and anyway that is a tropical, not a desert, island. So if I ever get stranded on a desert island I will need my favorite book and my sunglasses. 
Better yet to get stranded on a desserted island, maybe a coconut creme pineapple pie island.
Interesting! I don't recall seeing the word desert used only in the sense of unoccupied (i.e. deserted of people), but at least that would provide the logic for the phrase stranded on a desert island. The online dictionary I use has an entry for an "archaic" use meaning "a wild, uncultivated, and uninhabited region." But by that definition the lush, cornucopian Garden of Eden was a desert before Adam and Eve appeared, and I have secular aesthetic objections to that! Ditto for the Galapagos and Hawaiian Islands before people arrived. And could we then also call Ghost Towns Desert Towns? Another entry in my dictionary indicates that a desert can be "barren and uninhabited." Of course there is some cause and effect going on there: If a place is barren it's not surprising that it would be uninhabited (Las Vegas notwithstanding).
But the bottom line is that you're both telling me that either phrase is correct, and that in this case desert and deserted essentially mean the same thing: an island deserted of people. Thanks for fixing my left-brain thinking!
On a significant tangent, I have gotten a lot of "helpful" correction when I have used the phrase "just deserts" in writing. And I have seen it in the Wall Street Journal (online) as "just desserts." (The print version of the same article had it correct as "just deserts.") At least one of my unhelpful editors was an ivy-league English Lit. major.
I guess people are so focused on the arid vs. sweet, "desert" vs. "dessert", dichotomy that they forget about merited "desert" option altogether. Then the pronunciation leads them astray to the tasty side.
Frankly, my just deserts are mostly not sweet at all.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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