I don’t know about you but I find all this naming of hurricanes after girls a bit unethical. I used to know a girl called Irma and very nice she was too. Elegant, placid and serene. Certainly not prone to concerted bouts of wind. So there goes another memory defiled. Why not name your hurricanes after something blustery and destructive? Hurricane Trump, say.
I don’t know what Sir Francis Beaufort would have made of it. A couple of hundred years ago when he was establishing his wind scale, he didn’t stoop so low as to use innocent people’s names. He used noble descriptions like ‘That which no canvas sails could withstand’ (meaning a hurricane).
On 28th May 1860, a ‘whole gale’ (or ‘that in which she could scarcely bear close reefed main topsail and reefed fore sail’) hit the coast of Norfolk, destroying boats and killing 194 men. It became known as The Great Gale of 1860. More powerful than The Great Storm of 1987, which flattened forests and blew the veneer off Michael Fish’s reputation as a reliable weatherman, The Great Gale of 1860 is still talked about in Norfolk villages, when they’re not being buffetted by the roar of Delia Smith.
I mention this because the date corresponds with a spike in the use of the word whelm. Not to be confused with ‘whelk’, a small marine mollusc which is prone to being whelmed, whelm, like gruntled, is one of those non-words that appears to have been overlooked in the creation of the English language. In fact, it is a word, and a perfectly good one too.
Popular at the beginning of the 19th century, whelm began to disappear from use as the more familiar overwhelm overwhelmed it. But something caused a sudden resurgence in the use of ‘whelm’ around 1860 and I can only assume it was The Great Gale.
For if there’s one thing The Great Gale was good for it was whelming. It whelmed here, it whelmed there, it whelmed everywhere. Whelm, you see, means to engulf, submerge, swamp, well up etc – all the sorts of things that seas do when whipped up by a great gale.
In these time-poor, stress-rich times, it’s not unusual to hear folk complaining of feeling overwhelmed. If you can do this without getting punched, try telling them that it’s more likely that they’re just feeling whelmed. The verb overwhelm evolved shortly after whelm in the early part of the 14th century and meant to overturn or capsize. As anyone who’s tried sailing a raft across the Atlantic will know, being whelmed is one thing, being overwhelmed is quite another.
So when we use overwhelmed to mean swamped, inundated etc, we’re really overstating the point. Whelmed would do. If only anybody knew what it meant.
As for underwhelmed, that’s a flippant play on the word overwhelmed, which someone used in the 1950s to everybody’s amusement and we’re still making the joke today. There are lots of words beginning with ‘over’ that don’t have a natural antonym beginning with ‘under’ but are just crying out for one. Overjoyed. Overcome. Overzealous. Overhaul. Overview. Overawed…
I could go on but I prefer to underegg the pudding.
