Save for those times when Tom Petty or REM are filling my world through headphones, my preference is for quiet. Which sadly leaves me in a vulnerable position given how insufferably noisy the world is.

Call up a website to try and read a 400-word story and you are blasted by a dozen pop-up ads. TV news is screaming on top of screaming. And when a football game requires four pre-game hype shovelers, three in-game announcers, a sideline reporter, and five post-game yappers, well, we have confirmation of meaningless information overkill to the nth degree.

Noise, all of it. Too much noise.

Thankfully there is duende.

Beautiful word, duende. Easily my favorite. Quiet, simple, succinct. To understand the charm of duende is to recall how George Frazier, the late and very great Boston Globe columnist Boston Globe, viewed it: “Duende is so difficult to define. Yet when it is there, it is unmistakable, inspiring our awe, quickening our memory.”

Duende was, conceded Frazier, in the eye of the beholder and so it is from this seat that the viewpoints will flow:

Luke Donald swinging a golf club is vintage duende. Ditto Adam Scott, Gary Woodland, and Ludvig Åberg. Not so Hideki Matsuyama, Viktor Hovland, Rickie Fowler, or Bryson DeChambeau.

Which isn’t to imply that one must have rhythm and tempo to produce great golf scores. Arnold Palmer proved that. But rhythm and tempo are pleasing ingredients that require polish and years of repetition and when the best of the best bring it, the gobs of duende follow.

In a galaxy many years ago, Anthony Kim was saturated in duende – he had youth and talent and a strut to write home about. The potential was there for many more years for duende to shine. But shamelessly he threw it all away and doesn’t have a sniff of duende anymore. Nor do those who continue to chronicle his story, by the way. Let it go.

AimPoint is totally devoid of duende. Trusting your eyes, your instinct, relying on days of practice and the voice of a caddie . . . that is duende.

What AimPoint does is give the game a bad look, so many players stepping close to the hole and straddling their lines, stuff that brings poor etiquette into the equation. As for small things that might go unnoticed but are loaded with duende, there is the diligence of picking up your tee. And if there is a hand-made wooden box on the tee where you can deposit broken tees, the duende is off the charts.

Should you clean up the mess of others, shame on them, duende for you.

With golf, duende doesn’t necessarily mean great players automatically have it. No, sir. What was it that Frazier once wrote: “Ted Williams had duende even when striking out, but Stan Musial lacked when hitting a home run.”

Case in point: Pre-LIV days, Brooks Koepka was piling up majors, even doing the very cool back-to-back thing, but he was totally devoid of duende. Musial. Dustin Johnson, on the other hand, had fewer majors but was loaded with duende. Williams.

Ernie Els dripped of duende. Not so Phil Mickelson. Geoff Ogilvy, quintessential duende. Davis Love III, not a speck. Karrie Webb had duende, and Julie Inkster makes two. Laura Davies was without and the same goes for Suzanne Pettersen.

Peter Thomson? My goodness, he had duende to spare. Gary Player? He traveled the world ignoring bacon and ice cream, but duende avoided him.

Duende can be felt on golf courses, too. Take the par-3 16th at TPC Scottsdale. Most people are numb thanks to the consumption of alcohol, but it doesn’t matter; they couldn’t feel the duende if it were there and it most certainly is not. There is, however, loads of duende a few steps away, at the par-5 15th.

Does anything about LIV have duende? Nada, zip, zilch. Oh, except for Louis Oosthuizen. Forever, Louis will be draped in duende.

Actually, the LIV stop in Adelaide, Australia, would be swimming in duende if not for the fact fans instead choose to swim in beer. Sigh. That’s a problem with tournament folks today. They think being hip, cool, and loud provides you with something special. Nope. Something special is Harbor Town Golf Links, which stages a PGA Tour tournament, the RBC Heritage, that is blanketed in duende.

Nine-hole golf courses dazzle in ambiance and duende, ditto for those well-maintained and vibrant municipals (looking at you, George Wright) and laugh if you will, but quality miniature golf course can be soaked in duende. Just cut out the nonsense with those final holes that swallow your golf ball; there is no duende in that.

Top 100 golf course lists are totally without duende. Partly because they are self-serving and boring, partly because courses that have duende don’t need to suck up to raters.

Double-strap golf bags are meh; single strap bags are sprinkled in duende. Large sprawling bunkers with bright white sand and steep faces might make you catch your breath, but they won’t leave you with a sense of duende. What does offer a whiff of duende is the well-positioned grass bunker.

On those rare occasions when golf isn’t dominating my attention, finding duende is an even bigger challenge. Checking in on a basketball game, for instance, four teammates coming in to to slap five to the lunkhead who just missed a free throw is so without duende that it’s laughable.

Then there’s the insufferable Siri, who is so without duende that it sickens me to realize the audience she commands. Using a dictionary, a map, a reference book from your office shelf, or even a website is more time consuming, yes, but at least such efforts remind you that you are capable of a little legwork and brain power so, yeah, go for it.

That’s duende.