I like to keep Wife happy for reasons any married male can understand, and one of the ways is to clean up the place when she asks. After bitching and moaning that I have to do something really important, like this endeavor.
So I found myself vacuuming Sunday afternoon instead of watching the vital 13 hours of pre-Super Bowl coverage on Fox. Suddenly, midway through my carpet cleaning tasks, I caught an earworm of the most wretched kind: “Afternoon Delight.” I turned off the vacuum. I turned it back on. I banged my head against the floor. I beat myself with a cricket bat. I shot up 100 percent pure heroin. But no. It would not go away.
There is a special place in you-know-where for this song, and the band that sings it, the Starland Vocal Band. (Chew that over: the Starland Vocal Band. A “band” with this name actually existed. They actually had a #1 hit. They actually had a TV variety show with David Letterman.)
In the ninth circle of Hell, the Starland Vocal Band croons this abomination through an iPod fused to my eardrums, endlessly. That, and Satan plays tennis with my vital organs.
Please stop
It’s not just the syrupy, cloying, nauseating country tune or the perky vocals, which recall more of church hymnal than nasty, pre-dinner shagging in which precious bodily fluids are exchanged. It isn’t that they stretch the word “afternoon” into sixteen syllables like they were going to have an orgasm when they finish singing it. It’s the word delight. It sucks. I hate hate hate hate the word delight.
Writers, more than the rest of the world, have words that bother the living crap out of them.
Delight is one of the most suck-ass words ever devised.
Why? You’re asking. Why would one word make this otherwise reasonable man turn into a raging language sphincter?
1) “That is so delightful!” Would you want to share some Afternoon Delight with someone who said this? No!
2) I constantly picture the word used in association with Elizabethian drama, especially Dr. Faustus: “Oh, how the sight of Helen doth delight my soul!” “Delight me, Mephostopholes!” “How your breasts fill me with delight!” Bravo Marlowe? No!
3) In a prior job, I had to interview someone who worked for a credit card company that had won an award for “customer quality.” If you’re wondering what the hell credit cards have to do with quality except to destroy the quality of your credit rating, I asked this executive the same thing. He said, “Our mission is to deliver customer delight.” Customer delight. No, no, no!
What the hell is that? I asked.
“You know, customer delight,” crappy credit card executive said. He went and used that heinous phrase another 28 times in two minutes (I counted). I wanted him to die. I wanted to throw up through the telephone, and he would choke on my vomit. (You can’t dust for vomit.)
I hate this word so much that I triple checked the body of my novel to ensure it does not appear. If someone said, “I will pay you $1 billion to publish your novel, as long as you give it the title Busload of Delight!,” I would say No! No! No! Go delight yourself!
LOL. Thanks for nothing–now I’ve got that idiotic song floating around my head; where Spanish verbs should be conjugating, “why wait until the middle of the cold dark night?” is dancing around instead.
You should have gone on and choked the guy; if anyone from my credit card company ever says they want to “delight” me, I’ll get them for sexual harassment.
I use ‘delight’ all the time and its gay cousin ‘delightful’ when I’m feeling extra extra gay, of course. Why? Because it makes my ass pucker. And I like to feel vulnerable sometimes, like that shower scene in American History X.
Very vulnerable indeed. And DELIGHTFUL!
“Skyrockets in flight, afternoon delight…”
Ah, the mid-1970s. What a great time to be a kid!
heh, i’m with Colin,,they were great but that song just grates on my nerves like nails down a chalk board.
I hate the word “nice”….it’s not even a word, i mean wtf does it mean. I loathe it when i hear someone say..”ohhh that looks nice”….its like one of those european countries who can’t make up their mind whether they are on one side or the bloody other!
I’d never heard of this song until I saw the rendition performed in Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy. I’m very lucky. I’ve still never been abused by the original.
I always wondered what exactly Turkish Delight is supposed to be. I know it’s a candy or confection. If I remember correctly, the children in The Chronicles Of Narnia books coveted this sweet, but it was never actually identified.
Anybody?
For me, it’s ‘lovely’. And I don’t mean ‘delight is a lovely word’, I mean ‘if somebody says something is lovely, I want to shove my pen up her nose’.
Maybe it’s a church thing, but whenever I hear people use the words ‘lovely’, ‘fellowship’, or ‘blessing’ in a casual conversation, I immediately know two things.
1. The speaker grew up in the church.
2. I’m going to shove my pen up his/her nose.
I’m not tirading against church or Christianity or God, just Churchspeak as a language unto itself.
Yeah, I never thought of it, but “delight” is a pretty gay word. I confess to having applied it to certain desserts, though. I’ll try to stop.
What do you think of “delectable?” I really like that one. I use it with a sinister voice and wring my hands.
Oh, I’ve got Afternoon Delight on MP3.
“Turkish Delight” is a sweet thing indeed, and treasured in Narnia. Personally, I think it would be a good name for a porn star.
If you haven’t heard “Afternoon Delight,” you should for your cultural edification. It ranks right down there with “Convoy”, “Undercover Angel,” bell bottoms, white afros, etc., as 70s artifacts, like, what the fuck were people thinking?
“Lovely” doesn’t have that grating quality to me, but I see where you’re coming from. Wife uses the word in reference to Liv Tyler. I use it in reference to my mother. The fellowship in this blog is a lovely blessing.
I HAVE A RECIPE FOR TURKISH DELIGHT. It was in one of the condensed Chronicles books that came with kids’ meals at Chick-fil-a. It is so sickly sweet you can’t stand it, but I will pass on the recipe if you really want to *delight* yourself with some.
I have a overactive imagination. So the first thing that I thought of when I heard the phrase “busload of delight” is a bus filled with vibrators and one very happy and compulsive librarian.
Hope their is a sale on batteries!
Delight was overtaken by the sincerity industries (greeting cards, self-help books, etc) sometime in the 60s and 70s,so it’s easy to discredit it as somehow inauthentic. But the word really points to something worth holding onto. Philip Sidney brings out one distinction:
“Laughter alone ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature. Delight hath a joy in it, either permanent or present. Laughter only a scornful tickling.”
When I leave a movie by the Farelly Bros., I’m laughing. When I leave a film like Barbershop, I feel delight. There’s no other word for it.
BookFraud: Why haven’t you posted recently? How’s the Bookfrau?
~Peter G.: I said that my dislike of the word was irrational. Philip Sydney’s been dead 450 years. My whole point — it worked worked well for the Elizabethans, as they couldn’t express sexual desire in so many words. Uptight Limeys!
I’ve posted another crummy story on the blog.
~Farmer Chris: you are a sick puppy and I can’t see why a repressed librarian would want a vibrator, even though I saw one in a recent issue of Hustler.
Delight eh? Ok, I’ll buy that. It has become a desperately wishy-washy word – about as meaningless as the song.
On the flip side, I love ‘hostile’.
Such a soft sounding word for something so, well, hostile.
but Blake??
ok, I’ll go with you on the turkish delight. That stuff is repulsive (apologies to any Turks reading this)
~Laura: as in, “some are born to sweet delight”? Blake drove me crazy. even though he was a genius. see philip sidney above.
No time to read this entire entertaining post, but “Afternoon Delight” is one of my husband’s favorite songs. LOL
BTW, you can guess my nickname! I have a gr8 sense of humor and am not offended. If you’re concerned, just email me your guess. We’re having a lot of fun on Jade’s site with it. Lois is playing………… WEll, I won’t twist your writing arm altough after seeing words you invented in high school (LMAO), I bet your guesses would elicit (not illicit) much needed laughter for the rest of us!
Did I mention that I gave clues today on Jade’s site? http://ClearlyJade.Blogspot.com
No time to read this entire entertaining post, but “Afternoon Delight” is one of my husband’s favorite songs. LOL
BTW, you can guess my nickname! I have a gr8 sense of humor and am not offended. If you’re concerned, just email me your guess. We’re having a lot of fun on Jade’s site with it. Lois is playing………… WEll, I won’t twist your writing arm altough after seeing words you invented in high school (LMAO), I bet your guesses would elicit (not illicit) much needed laughter for the rest of us!
Did I mention that I gave clues today on Jade’s site? http://ClearlyJade.Blogspot.com
No time to read this entire entertaining post, but “Afternoon Delight” is one of my husband’s favorite songs. LOL
BTW, you can guess my nickname! I have a gr8 sense of humor and am not offended. If you’re concerned, just email me your guess. We’re having a lot of fun on Jade’s site with it. Lois is playing………… WEll, I won’t twist your writing arm altough after seeing words you invented in high school (LMAO), I bet your guesses would elicit (not illicit) much needed laughter for the rest of us!
Did I mention that I gave clues today on Jade’s site? http://ClearlyJade.Blogspot.com