116. Old gold: Winning at whelm
An exploration of being right up to the line.
Dear Reader,
For this stage in the busy Christmas season I’ve dug up some festive finery! This ‘Old gold’ post is one I’d published for the first time last December, when I’d been trying to identify where best to draw a line in order not to be engulfed by too much glee, tinsel or festive frolicry.
If you’re reading ‘Winning at whelm’ for the first time: welcome, and I hope you enjoy it. If you’ve read it before: thank you so much for sticking around to read it again!
Wishing you love and smiles for a jolly holly holiday,
Rebecca x
Winning at whelm: An exploration of being right up to the line.
Dear Reader,
Whether it’s toothpaste, fireplace, blackbird or Substack I love compound words: maybe it’s because of the time I’ve spent in Germany, where words are strung together like verbal paperchains.
I love these examples for being so descriptively obvious:
‘der Fingerhut’ (finger + hat) is thimble, as well as the name for the foxglove flower.
‘der Staubsauger’ (dust + sucker) is vacuum cleaner.
‘das Flugzeug’ (flight + stuff) is aeroplane.
These are perhaps more conceptual:
‘die Hochzeit’ (high + time) is wedding.
‘das Schmerzensgeld’ (pain + money) is compensation.
‘der Wichtigtuer’ (important + doer) is busybody or pompous idiot.
And there’s so much scope to go further, look:
‘der Geschäftsführer’ (business + leader) is company director.
‘die Geschäftsführeranstellung’ (business + leader + employment) is the appointment of a company director.
’der Geschäftsführeranstellungsvertrag’ (business + leader + employment + contract) is the contract of employment of a company director.
And there are longer compound nouns than that in the German language, trust me!
In this busy, complicated run-up to Christmas I’ve been hearing all sorts of compound words to describe an inability to cope, or an uncomfortable sense of pressure.
‘Burnout’ is one. ‘Overtired’ is another. Someone told me last week that they’re feeling ‘steamrollered’. And Reader, I see the word ‘overwhelm’ everywhere.
Can I even call ‘overwhelm’ a compound word, though, when these days ‘whelm’ doesn’t actually exist in isolation? Yes, we have ‘overwhelm’ and ‘underwhelm’, but modern English is lacking in actual ‘whelm’. Reader, it’s whelmless.
The word ‘whelm’ is one we don’t use today, but it means to engulf or to submerge. It is a surge of water. If a boat is ‘whelmed’, the water is threatening to creep over the gunwales and flood the vessel. If it then becomes ‘overwhelmed’, that boat is pretty much sinking.
From a metaphorical standpoint, to be ‘overwhelmed’ is to be overcome by something to the extent that you cannot cope. Its cousin ‘whelm’ has altogether disappeared from contemporary usage.
Now that I’ve done my duty to acknowledge that it was is actually used to be a word, I’m interpreting modern-day ‘whelm’ for myself as being not quite ‘overwhelm’… but nearly.
DISCLAIMER: What follows should not be taken as an actual definition: please view it as my own interpretation of what I’m calling ‘whelm’.
If I have a lot on my metaphorical plate of Christmas dinner but am pretty sure I can just about gobble up all that turkey without it being too much for me, I am ‘whelmed’.
‘Whelm’ doesn’t mean ‘enough’: it’s not simply a happy medium between ‘overwhelm’ (which I’d define as ‘AAARGGHHH, TOO MUCH, CAN’T COPE!) and ‘underwhelm’ (yeah right, big deal, sooooooo unimpressed……).
Instead ‘whelm’ is just the right side of overwhelm. ‘Whelm’ is busy, very busy, but not quite TOO busy. It’s a feeling of ‘I can’t do much more than this, but I can do this’. It’s a feeling of ‘Wow, I feel great: I’ve got a lot on but I’m nailing all of it.
‘Whelm’ is challenging, but still just about comfortable.
And that’s exactly what I need in the run-up to what is always an overwhelming a busy festive season. I need to #bemorewhelmed.
I mean, yeah, I could relax a bit: take my foot off the gas. Chill. Curl up and read a book one afternoon instead of choosing to tackle ever more of the tasks on my to-do list.
But that’s a double-edged sword. In order not to ‘overwhelm’ myself by throwing myself into every task on my list like a whirling dervish, I’m risking being unimpressed and ‘underwhelmed’ by what I’m not achieving towards Christmas.
Because my to-do list needs to-doing, right?
How will I feel if it doesn’t get to-done?
I want to be busy, but in my all-or-nothing approach to life I’m risking either idleness or burnout. And in the middle, the happy medium is very comfortable, yes, but disappointingly non-committal.
Reader, I’m happy to settle for beyond medium. I want more than enough to do: I want ‘whelm’. Because the right place for me is at the edge, my nose pressed up right against the line between the middle and the gone-too-far. I don’t want to breach the boundary, leave my gunwales unprotected and risk my boat sinking, but I want to be in the not quite precarious position of being able to challenge overwhelm up close and laugh in its face at its vain attempts to swamp me.
Do I have enough on my plate? Absolutely. Do I want more? No thanks. Offering me both challenges and comfort, ‘whelm’ is a platter of festive plenty with not quite too much on it.
I’m happy with that.
🎄
Love,
Rebecca
📚 Reading 📚
📚 As a regular reader of the Saturday edition of The Daily Telegraph and, very recently, her fabulously life-affirming book Mad Girl,1 I was thrilled last week to find columnist and best-selling author
right here on Substack. (How on earth it had taken me so long I’ve no idea.)And guess what? Bryony’s recent post on
is all about overwhelm. No, I’m not saying ‘great minds think alike’Read it and ♥️ it here:
📚 Regular readers of ‘Dear Reader, I’m Lost' will be no strangers to my ongoing light-hearted correspondence with fellow Brit Terry Freedman of Eclecticism: Reflections on literature and life. He’ll be writing me a letter on Wednesday in response to my latest missive.
🎄
My next ‘Letter to Terry’, which will be a riproaring ride of a review of our year in chortlesome correspondence, will be published on Wednesday, December 27.
⭐️
December’s edition of my ‘Art & treasures’ series, my final post of 2023, will be published on Saturday, December 30.
⭐️
Thank you so very much for reading my words this year, and here’s to a fabulous 2024 for all of us.
⭐️
With love, Rebecca
♥️
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Mad Girl was published in 2016 by Headline Publishing Group. Here’s the blurb from the back:
Bryony Gordon has OCD.
It’s the snake in her brain that has told her ever since she was a teenager that her world is about to come crashing down. It’s caused alopecia, bulimia, and drug dependency. And Bryony is sick of it. Keeping silent about her illness has given it a cachet it simply doesn’t deserve, so here she shares her story with warmth, humour and jaw-dropping honesty.
A hugely successful columnist for the Telegraph, a bestselling author, and a happily married mother of an adorable daughter, Bryony has managed to laugh and live well while simultaneously grappling with her illness. Now it’s time for her to speak out. In Mad Girl, Bryony explores her relationship with her OCD and depression as only she can.
I was totally whelmed by midday today (thank you so much for that word!!!!!!!!!!!!), not OVERwhelmed, but almost - hanging on by a thread. So the Terrier and I went walking along a country road, just us and the bush birds and a sprinkling of rain and I powered up the hill, knee and glutes notwithstanding. When the Terrier and I go to the top, I felt the whelm sliding away, dissolving like a mist, and then we walked back down with me a much lighter person. The word is now my word of the week and I shall carry it in my pocket on a label and stick it to my chest every time I'm asked to add something more to that Bloody Christmas To-Do List!
Toodles!
Absolutely THE STORY I needed to read today. Thank you for defining "whelm" and its delightful state of being. At 74, I've found it a lot harder to do all my to-dos, yet I've achieved a pleasant state of whelm. Now I have a word for it to say to people should they dare challenge my lack of energy, pride, and accomplishment. Instead of telling where they can spend their eternities, I'll just tell them I'm whelmed and happy to be so. Let them figure out what that means. teehee