Which of the following doesn’t belong?
- Fanta
- Dr. Pepper
- Coke
- Pepsi
- Skipper
- Parker
- 7Up
- Sprite
- Mountain Dew
- Mr. Pibb
- Ditto
All are names of soft drinks. Ditto is the name of a new lemon-lime drink that is the Safeway house brand. It strikes me as so different than the other names on the list that I flatter myself to think that there is some connection with my invention of the term ditto food in The Shangri-La Diet. Soft drinks are prototypical ditto foods.
A few years before Nabokov’s novel Lolita was published, a short story by Dorothy Parker titled “Lolita” appeared in The New Yorker. Nabokov had published often in The New Yorker, and he wrote an angry letter to Katherine White, the fiction editor, complaining that the manuscript of Lolita that he had shown them in confidence had somehow leaked. White wrote back that it was a coincidence.