How do I sort by a column name that's reserved in that context?

Question

I'm working with a legacy database with columns such as "item" and "desc" (for description).

Obviously, there's issues when trying to do an ordered select such as:

SELECT item, desc FROM blah ORDER BY desc

The intent is to do an ascending sort of column "desc", but SQL server gets confused since desc is also a modifier for order by... How do I escape the field name so that it work appropriately? Do I have to select a second copy of that column as a different name to use in the order by?

Answer 1

Surround the keyword desc with square brackets:

SELECT item, [desc] FROM blah ORDER BY [desc]

Answer 2

select b.item,b.desc from blah as b order by b.desc asc

I was wrong. The above is indeed incorrect. Brackets are the way to go.