the.com/delight
joy's sharper cousin — the gasp before the grin, surprise wearing its Sunday best
means A feeling of intense pleasure or joy, often sparked by something pleasing or unexpected; also the thing that causes it.
from From Old French 'delit,' a noun built on the verb 'delitier' (to please, charm), which descends from Latin 'delectare' — 'to allure, entice, delight' — itself a frequentative of 'delicere,' meaning roughly 'to lure away.' So at its root, delight is a kind of sweet abduction. The 'gh' spelling, oddly, is a later English imposter: the word had no such sound, but writers fitted it with a silent 'gh' by analogy with words like 'light' and 'night,' giving it a borrowed costume it never needed.
- latin root
- from delectare, to allure or entice
- silent g
- the g was added later by mistaken etymology
- turkish delight
- named the candy that betrayed Narnia
- brain chemistry
- dopamine spikes most from unexpected delight, not expected
newton's apple incident — falling fruit in woolsthorpe garden sparked gravity law, circa 1666
hiroo onoda's repatriation — japanese soldier emerged from philippine jungle after 29 years, 1974, learning wwii had ended