I’m sure it’s not everyone, but there’s a lot of it going around: you’re overwhelmed by what’s going on in the world, overwhelmed at work, maybe even overwhelmed in your personal life, and then, when you get some leisure time and take in the available entertainments (or, after an overwhelming travel experience, get to an affordable destination, if any such exists), you find the enjoyment level… underwhelming.
Welp.
I reckon we need some whelmness coaching. So we can get our level of whelm just right.
OK, OK, word cranks. Yes, whelmness is not in your dictionary. So what. There was a time when underwhelmed wasn’t in any dictionary, but it took root nonetheless.
And OK, yes, word nerds, whelm actually means the same as overwhelm, according to any dictionary you look in. But try using it that way, my friends. “I was completely whelmed by work.” “Oh, so you were suitably gruntled? Reasonably combobulated? You’re acceptably shevelled?” “No, no, I was whelmed. Which means ‘overwhelmed.’” “Well, why didn’t you just say ‘overwhelmed’ like a normal person, then? Are you trying to overwhelm us with your dictionary study? Because I’m a bit… uh… underwhelmed here.”
Yes, this is how it is: whelm meant, originally, ‘overturn’ or ‘capsize’; a thing that was whelmed was either a boat or other thing inverted with concavity down, or someone or something covered by such a concavity. It seems to have come from a root referring to arches or vaults, as in vaulted ceilings – in other words, if you whelmed your boat, you turned its hull into a ceiling. And from that, whelm then came to mean ‘sink, submerge, drown’. And from that, it came to mean ‘engulf, bury’ – if an avalanche covers you, you are in that sense whelmed.
These senses of whelm showed up in English in the 1300s and 1400s, but also by the 1400s we had overwhelm, meaning ‘overturn’ or ‘overrun’. Why bother with the over? Well, why bother with the by in bypass? Why say both hence (‘from here’) and forth (‘forward’) in henceforth? Why say linchpin when linch means ‘pin’?
The answer is that sometimes it’s for clarity, and sometimes it’s for emphasis, and sometimes it just sounds more impressive – and sometimes it’s two or all three of those reasons, which is probably the case with overwhelm.
And, quickly, from ‘drowned’ or ‘buried’, overwhelm came to a broader figurative sense of ‘defeat utterly’ – so that if you (figuratively) lose in (or by) a landslide, you are (figuratively in the same sense) overwhelmed. And thus we have overwhelming odds, overwhelming victory, and, you know, overwhelming stench and overwhelmed by emotion and, with only a little bit of weakening of the sense, overwhelmed by work.
And since we had this word overwhelm, so vivid and forceful and long, there was no call for the weaker whelm, and at length we did not learn what the books say it means. And thus of course it’s easy for people to make a guess as to what the whelm means and, seriously or perhaps a bit jocularly (just as with recombobulate), come up with underwhelmed. Which first showed up in the 1950s. And absolutely sealed the fate of whelm, which was, we may say, overwhelmed by the trend of usage.
And thus, in the same jocular vein, with a play on wellness, it seems perfectly obvious to talk about whelmness. I’m not the first person to confect that, either. It’s sitting right there. When you see whelmness, you can recognize what it means: something on the order of ‘level of challenge from life circumstances’. And you may smile ruefully and check your own internal whelmometer.
Sesquiotica 