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The other day I told my bunch that I would pass this to you for enlightenment or whatever.
Someone mentioned a pretty busy day, but 'not overwhelming.'
Then, again, they said, it wasn't 'underwhelming':)
They were just whelmed.
Was this ever a commonly used word? Where did it come from, or where did it go?
I know we could look in a dictionary, but this is more fun.
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originally, to be whelmed was itself to be pretty overwhelmed. but there's always someone that has to get hyperbolic about these things. <g>
whelm and overwhelm are both quite old (1300 and 1400 respectively); underwhelm was coined ca. 1956.
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Pooh-Bah
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1956 ... obviously took them a long time to get over being whelmed, didn't it?
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Maybe they were quasi-whelmed.
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If underwhelmed meant what it should mean it would be just as bad as overwhelmed. It would mean having your base washed out from beneath you leaving you nothing to stand on.
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Then there's always Matt wHelmed, said of a villain who is undone by a 60s secret agent. Note: this is not the secrfet agent played by Dean Martin, these are novels by a guy named Donald Hamilton, beginning with Death of a Citizen IIRC.
TEd
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Just as "underwhelmed" has been derived from "overwhelmed," "whelmed" in the new sense of "no special effect; eliciting a feeling of indifference" has entered the vocabulary recently (in the last 20 years, in my experience) as a backformation of sorts from "overwhelmed." My American Heritage Dictionary doesn't yet include the new meaning of "whelmed" in its definitions, but I'd bet that'll change soon enough.
Aside: while typing this, I managed to write "volcabulary" ... which I now take the opportunity to define as "terms related to the field of volcanology."
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> volcabulary
or using explosive words...
formerly known as etaoin...
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Jomama, it's nice to see you again. [HUG]
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The volcabulary are the people with guns and badges who keep hikers and curiosity seekers out of the area around Mount Saint Helens when she is threatening to erupt .. like now.
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Ah, yes! They're constants, aren't they? 
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> threatening to erupt .. like now.
yeah, I was watching the cam all day. starting to look very interesting.
formerly known as etaoin...
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And you, too, Jackie [HUGS]!
Would those guards be constant constables, then?
And thanks for the link, Fr Steve...Neat!
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Pooh-Bah
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I'd heard Mt St Helens was "hotting up" again. What's the skinny on it, Padre?
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thanks, FS, I was too lazy last night...
formerly known as etaoin...
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[complain e] All I can see are a bunch of blue, red, and green splotches on a black background.
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Maybe it's too early, Jackie. It's 6 am there....
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The mountain never "cooled off" but has been in what is described as a constant state of eruption since the big one. A "constant state of eruption" can sometimes mean no more than that the dome in the middle of the crater is growing (lifting) in small but measurable ways. Other times it is more violent and dramatic, e.g. steam jets, ash plumes, rock slides and the like. A new word -- lahar -- has entered the vocabulary of folks around here. I think it comes from Indonesia. It means flows of mud and debris which can sluice down the side of a volcano. It happens in places where it rains a lot .. like here! The kids who go to school in the shadow of the mountain now have to learn lahar evacuation routes and procedures, much as we learned how to hide under our desks in the event of an atom bomb attack when I was in elementary school.
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Pooh-Bah
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Thanks Padre. Yep, I understand volcanism to some extent - NZ being a particularly bubbly kind of a place. A lahar off Mt Ruapehu in 1953 wiped out a rail bridge, causing the overnight express between Wellington and Auckland to plunge into a river killing a lot of people. Tje rail line was nearly five miles away from the crater.
I was curious to know if Mt St Helens had shown any greater propensity to erupt than usual. Mt Tarawera did exactly what Mt St Helens did in 1863, although it was much smaller than Mt St Helens. The scars are still visible even today.
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We, in the Pacific Northwest, have become inured to eruption warnings and act blasé when the press mentions anything less than lava streaming down the side of the mountain or ash rising thousands of feet into the sky, threatening air traffic. I think there is some recent rumbling about the frequency and intensity of the rumblings, which may mean something, but the predictions are (understandably) couched in so much provisionality as to dissuade one from much notice.
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> as to dissuade one from much notice
sort of Son of Global Warming then? :I
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Well, I'm rapidly becoming convinced that global warming (caused by humans) is vastly overstated. That'll teach me to just accept what the avant garde scientists have to say without at least checking their facts!
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Yah, there are many here in the Pacific Northwest who do not believe in Global Warming -- at least not in the sense of something caused by leaking refigerators and the exhaust of SUVs. While that theory is close to the hearts of many of the greenest of the Greens in Seattle, I suspect that the majority thinks it is junk science, if they think about it at all.
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> majority thinks it is junk science, if they think about it at all [e.a.]
and this should reassure me, in the week Cali gets about 7" of rain in a few days?!
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Nothing thought by a majority ought ever reassure anybody of anything. After all, the majority thought the world was flat, that witches did not float, that words could turn stone into gold and that Michael Jackson was a harmless eccentric.
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How very interesting! Below is a definition of 'whelm' that is utilitarian (1st definition):
"1 : to turn (as a dish or vessel) upside down usually to cover something : cover or engulf completely with usually disastrous effect
2 : to overcome in thought or feeling "
MW online
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> Nothing thought by a majority ought ever reassure anybody of anything. After all, the majority thought the world was flat, that witches did not float, that words could turn stone into gold and that Michael Jackson was a harmless eccentric.
What's the current state of belief in the USA about curtains and a hidden man? <eg>
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>majority thought.. that witches did not float
I recall that, according to MP, witches did float (and the innocent thus were drowned); did our heros have it backwards?
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Bevedere: What else floats?
Villager 2: Small rocks!
According to NOAA research - balloon and satellite temperature readings over the past 20 years - there has been no measureable increase in the temperature of the troposphere (1 miles to 5 miles up) which is where the CO2 accumulates and which would have to heat up to be responsible for the apparent global warming we are experiencing. The conclusion is therefore inescapable that global warming due to your SUVs or CFCs in highly overrated. On the other hand, astronomers have shown an almost seamless fit between variability in the sun's output and major climatological events over the past 150 years.
It seems to me that the conclusion that the events we are seeing are actually naturally variability in climate is pretty hard to avoid.
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Latest research, looking at ocean temperatures, indicates that global worming is happening. As to the beliefs of the majority, the majority of people believe that if you take a running leap off a high, sheer cliff you will fall to your death on the rocks below.
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Pfranz has expressed this far better than could I. There are several poor fellows at the University of Washington who have had the audacity to buck the political tide which insists that there is such a critter as human-induced global warning. They have apparently jeopardized their careers by saying the unpopular .. in terms very much like those which Capfka has shared here.
Me, I am not nearly bright enough to know the correct answer, but the panic of the herd seems to exceed its scientific warrant.
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Faldo, nobody's arguing that there is no global warming. It's just that there appears to be little or no scientific evidence to use as a basis for the constant refrain that the CO2 that we've injected into the atmosphere is causing it. After all, global temperatures DECLINED between 1945 and 1979. The research I saw seemed to support a natural cyclical approach to climatic changes. I have similar doubts (but I've seen no research to support them) about the "causes" of the "hole in the ozone layer" over the Southern Ocean. CFCs? Well, if that's the case then why isn't the hole over the northern hemisphere? That, after all, is where the vast majority of CFCs have been released, isn't it? I can't buy the "they're heavy so they sink to the bottom" argument, in case anyone was thinking about advancing it!  It's all too emotive as far as I'm concerned. The political correctness thang seems to have taken over. The Padre is quite correct. If you are a scientist and you want grants for research into climatological change, you have to subscribe to the PC theories du jour. I've also seen varying sets of figures on what Kyoto would actually achieve. They all differ in detail, but the upshot is the same in each case. Countries who've signed up and who will try to be "honest brokers" and meet their commitments will potentially beggar themselves to defer the projected unregulated rate of warming for (and this is where the variability comes in) between 3 and 6 years. While I have very little time for the Bush administration, they're bang on about this one. To meet Kyoto would cost somewhere between $300 billion and $400 billion per annum for twenty years (from memory). This would cripple the US economy. Not just slow it down. And for what? Here's a short article which puts it into perspective: http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Kyoto_Count_Up.htm
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Latest research... indicates that global worming is happening. ~Faldage
Yep. Everywhere except in Macs.
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> The conclusion is therefore inescapable
Come off it. That is a partial and tendencious view of that research at best. See the article in New Scientist a couple of weeks ago. See the latest edition of Nature.
The only completely undoubted and independently verifiable fact at the moment is this: the scientists involved in serious disputation of the overarching evidence of man-made global warming are funded by Exxon. I wonder why?
Apart from them there is a virtual unanimity view emerging. Could they all be wrong? Of course, it's the scientific method. But it is a methodical view; it's also mankind's best and most educated guess right now. If you want to jump off the cliff with the SUV brigade, go ahead... people will still be calling our gleefully "look, there's no problem..." even just before they hit the beach.
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...and this has exactly what to do with Q&A about words?
(I know, and y'all know of a perfectly fine forum for this sort of thing at another venue.)
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Well, I guess it's escapable if you believe that NOAA is cooking its atmospheric temperature figures. Otherwise you have to believe that heat is passing through the troposphere at a "normal" rate and that global warming is caused by something else. Physics says that if the CO2 in the troposphere was blocking heat that the troposphere would heat up measurably. This hasn't happened according to NOAA.
As I said above I'm not trying to deny that we are experiencing a change in the global climate. I just don't necessarily buy the argument that it's due to CO2 in the atmosphere. If someone else comes up with data-driven (as opposed to theoretically modelled) proof that CO2 is doing it, I'd change my mind like a shot. But I've been reading this stuff up lately and while I started out believing that it was CO2 that was causing the change, I'm now much less than convinced.
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