what kind of words are these?

Wordsmith.org

I recently had occasion to look up the etymology of "overwhelmed". I figured that since one could be "overwhelmed" or "underwhelmed", there must be some normative state of being "whelmed". I discovered the OE link with helmet, i.e. "to be covered". OK, understandable.

But then I realized that the "under" in "underwelmed" was a logical variation not on the root word, but only on the prefix, and etymologically made little sense.

Is there a name for such words? I would define them as non-etymological arbitrary, sometimes even contradictory variations.

underwhelmed is really just a neologism, no? (hi dale!)

and hi Marc! and welcome to the Board!

Quote:

underwhelmed is really just a neologism, no? (hi dale!)

yeah.. 50 years ago!

1956 T. K. QUINN Giant Corporations viii. 61 He wrote..commending the action of one of the giant corporations for a..price reduction at a time when prices were rising. I was underwhelmed, and investigated.

edit: from M-W Dict. of English Usage..
Our earliest record of it is from the New Yorker in 1944, when it was used by Howard Brubaker in the form of the participial adjective underwhelming. We first found it used as a transitive verb in 1949: And Dr. James B. Conant's recent effort to find a cause for hope... leaves me, in the words of Abner Dean, utterly underwhelmed. -Philip Wylie, letter to the Editor, Atlantic, April 1949

cool, it's a kind of retroneologism!

It's a neologism, but it's a certain kind of neologism in which the "neo" part, unlike the "archeo" part, has no relationship, or even a contradictory one, to the once consonant etymology. "Over" is right for "whelmed", but "under" is wrong.

it's an instance where an originally jocular reversal has become embedded in the language (and, perforce, our dictionaries).

Etymologically, underwhelm should mean having the ground swept out from under one's feet.

and overwhelmed is basically redundant?

Mehbe I was working on a misuderstanding. I had thought that the whelm part was somehow related to waves and the whole overwhelm image was of waves rolling over someone. The underwhelm that I had derived from that had the wavbes washing away the beach being stood upon. But it turns out, yes, overwhelm is redundant. But you'd be surprised how rife redundancy is in our language.

yah, the wave thing makes sense, etymology.