Towels: a new paradigm

A reader emails from a point somewhat south. It's not often that a simple email contains a major theoretical breakthrough, but I do believe that this one does. It intervenes decisively in the towel controversy first described by me here, then taken up by Chris Young at Explananda, here and here, and then again here in response to my gentle rejoinder here. (Talk about flogging a dead horse.) But this emailer brings a breath of fresh air into the whole dispute, deconstructing fixed antitheses with a flexible, even dialectical, sensibility and turning the whole discipline of Towel Studies upside down. My young correspondent writes:

Two points on the towels controversy:

1. The correct terminology you should be using (and I say this speaking as someone who's spent a lot of time buying these kinds of thing recently) is 'bath towel' and 'bath sheet'. You favour a bath towel, WotN and Chris Young prefer a bath sheet.

2. I have the last word on this issue. I think the reason for your preference is to do with what I guess to be your temperament and the way in which you like to dry yourself. I imagine you do it quickly and with great efficiency, using the towel on various parts of your body until you're dry. I, on the other hand, just wrap the towel around myself and wander around with it there whilst doing stuff, until I get dry (as I suppose to be true also of WotN and Chris Young). With this method, dryness is obviously achieved more quickly the more of your body is covered with the towel; so, clearly it's better to have a bigger towel if it's the method you use. Otherwise, you may have a point. (Of course, during the winter, it's also better to have a bigger towel, just for that moment when you get out of the bath. You don't want to be cold, do you?)

A veritable pioneer of New Towelism.