Blogocentric Formulations

Whelmed

One of my favorite movies of all time is 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU. (If you haven't seen it yet, please check it out... it's wonderful!) Among the many, many clever lines in the movie, there's a brief moment between best friends Biana (Larisa Oleynik) and Chastity (Gabrielle Union) where Chastity asks, "I know you can be overwhelmed, and you can be underwhelmed... but can you ever been just whelmed?" To which Bianca replies, "I think you can in Europe."

Well, as luck would have it, the word-of-the-day email in my inbox this morning was indeed for the word "whelmed."

And here's a little trivia about the origin of the word:

"It is not overwhelming and it is not underwhelming. You leave the production feeling merely whelmed." Thus wrote Michael Phillips in the Los Angeles Times, February 6, 2001. Contemporary writers like Philips sometimes use "whelm" to denote a middle stage between "underwhelm" and "overwhelm." But that's not how "whelm" has traditionally been used. "Whelm" and "overwhelm" have been with us since Middle English (when they were "whelmen" and "overwhelmen"), and throughout the years their meanings have largely overlapped. Both words early on meant "to overturn," for example, and both have also come to mean "to overpower in thought or feeling." Around 1950, however, folks started using a third word, "underwhelmed," for "unimpressed," and lately "whelmed" has been popping up with the meaning "moderately impressed."

So there you go! You can indeed be whelmed... and not just in Europe!