DataFrame.drop(colName) fails if another column has a period in its name

The following code fails with org.apache.spark.sql.AnalysisException: cannot resolve 'x.y' given input columns: [abc, x.y] because of the way drop() uses select() under the covers.

val rdd = sc.makeRDD("""{"x.y": 5, "abc": 10}""" :: Nil)
sqlContext.read.json(rdd).drop("abc")