The Most Suck Ass Word of All Time (Highly Irrational Blather Below)

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!