Nonchalantly Underwhelmed

urbandictionary.com

     Sometimes I get hung up about words. Sometimes it is out of curiosity. Mostly, I like to delude myself into believing that it is related to the image I think I have of myself as a writer, you know, a man of letters, a wordsmith.  Here are a few examples in this Seinfeldish blog about about nothing.
     My second boss at Ford Motor was a few years older me. I was a direct report of his and it was his first managerial job. He used to use the word whelm which I had never really heard. He would often ask, “Are you overwhelmed, underwhelmed, or just whelmed?” I think that he used underwhelmed and overwhelmed correctly and assumed, as I did, whelmed just something like having a workload or task list that was normal or doable.
     I just finally looked up the three words:

• Overwhelm: “bury or drown beneath a huge mass.”
• Underwhelm: “fail to impress or make a positive impact on (someone); disappoint.”

     And whelm, the word I had only heard him use? I wasn't sure it was a word, so only he used it. I was surprised to find that it is a perfectly good word that means to “engulf, submerge, or bury (someone or something).” Well, that did not really help very much. In fact, it confused things a bit. If I was whelmed, I would be engulfed, submerged, or buried. If I was overwhelmed? I would also be buried. So, whelmed is not a neutral place between being underwhelmed and overwhelmed. Actually, overwhelmed is kind of redundant. It is like being  whelm-whelmed.
     Furthermore, underwhelmed is not the opposite of whelmed or overwhelmed. It is more about being disappointed or not impressed. It can even have a humorous twinge to it.
     In the second example, I have been thinking about the word nonchalant. It means “feeling or appearing casually calm and relaxed; not displaying anxiety, interest, or enthusiasm.” OK, that is how I use the word. It is basically how everyone uses the word. It is like being chill in the slangy vernacular of these days.
     Nonchalant begins with non which is, of course, a negative. It would make sense that there is a word, chalant, that means the opposite of nonchalant. Chalant should mean agitated and anxious. The problem is that there is no such word. Chalant doesn’t exist. It is not in the dictionary. It is not a word. A google search simply confirmed this and also let me know that I am not the first person to think of and inquire about this.
     But wait, maybe it is becoming a word. It is in the Urban Dictionary meaning “extreme concern about an object."  In the slangy vernacular, maybe Net Flix and Chill is kind of like being chalant about one’s significant other.  At my age, I am sure I got this wrong.