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Discover Your Odds of Getting into Medical School
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couple of days leading up to labor day weekend

😎


probly no news for me from the med schools
 
Mailbag Friday: "(Over)whelmed"

August 22, 2008
By Ben Zimmer Welcome to Mailbag Friday, where we answer your burning questions about the origins of words and phrases. Ivete L. of New York, NY asks: "You can be overwhelmed, and I suppose you can even be underwhelmed. But why can't you be just plain whelmed?"
As a matter of fact, you can be whelmed, but only if you're feeling particularly lyrical or anachronistic. The word shows up in poetic usage, mostly by writers from a bygone era. A few literary examples:
They saw them whelmed, and all their confidence
Under the weight of mountains buried deep.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)
We perished, each alone;
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.
—William Cowper, "The Castaway" (1799)

How can I, whelmed by a flux of talk, meditate upon the Way?
—Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901)
​
As you might be able to tell from these examples, the old, poetic verb whelm can mean roughly the same thing as overwhelm: "overcome, as with emotions or perceptual stimuli," as the Visual Thesaurus defines it. Originally, as it developed in fourteenth-century Middle English, whelm meant "to overturn, capsize." By Shakespeare's time, it could also mean "to cover completely with water, submerge," as in the line from The Merry Wives of Windsor, "Give fire! She is my prize, or ocean whelm them all!" From there whelm was extended to refer to being overcome by immaterial forces.
Meanwhile, the word overwhelm was making a similar transformation, from referring to literal submersion or capsizing to more metaphorical feelings of helplessness in the face of something very powerful. The over- prefix originally served to drive home the topsy-turviness of the root form whelm; as with words like overturn or overthrow, the main sense of the prefix is inversion, a turning over. When overwhelm went down a more figurative path, it joined up with some other over-words like overcome, overpower, overrun, and overtake, where the prefix suggests a potent force taking hold and running roughshod.
Over time, however, the whelm part of overwhelm became less and less familiar to English speakers (except perhaps for literature majors). This loss of transparency happens all the time, when a derived form lingers even though the root has fallen by the wayside: think of the hap in hapless or the couth in uncouth. (Hap used to mean "luck" and couth meant "known, familiar, pleasant," in case you were wondering.) This kind of situation often leads to jokey antonyms, like gruntled playfully used as the opposite of disgruntled, or kempt as the opposite of unkempt.
In the case of overwhelm, underwhelm developed as a facetious flip-side in the mid-twentieth century. The Oxford English Dictionary dates it to 1956, but with newly digitized newspaper databases we can take it back a quarter century earlier: in the October 10, 1931 edition of the Fresno Bee, the syndicated columnist Arthur "Bugs" Baer wrote: "The organized lawyers voted to repeal the eighteenth amendment by an underwhelming vote of two to one."
And what about just plain whelm? Some people would like to salvage the old word, but not in the poetic sense of capsizing boats. Being whelmed can strike a middle ground between being overwhelmed and underwhelmed. Blogger Rhett Burns, for instance, writes of a conversation with a friend about "how we tend to fluctuate between two opposite extremes":
The first extreme is being overwhelmed. I don't operate effectively or sanely in this state. Panic comes more easily. Stress is high. And while I'm very focused, I'm not very fun to be around.
The second extreme is underwhelmed. I operate too often in this state. I procrastinate. I'm not too concerned. Details get overlooked. Things don't get done. Inactivity sets in. And while I'm more fun to be around, I'm not very focused.
We both came to the conclusion that we just want to be whelmed. Not overwhelmed. Not underwhelmed. Just whelmed.
​
May we all find such a happy equilibrium.
 
i wish that i was a verbal reasoning instructor instead of physical sciences

all we would do is just read and bull****
 
man, i was right that this thread really delivers. i said i wanted some good news, and within ten minutes I get my first interview!!!! yay!!! I feel so much better now.
 
U wisconsin. But it's the only school of the 8 i applied to that's giving out full mstp interviews by now, or so I think. 🙂🙂🙂
 
ok I think I like UW already. At least the mstp director.

in the email:
"PS. We are a casual group. Please DO NOT bring a suit and tie! You will be doing a lot of walking around on Friday, so nice comfortable clothes and shoes are in order."
and hotel is already booked. woot!
 
CielloStelatto said:
ok I think I like UW already. At least the mstp director.

in the email:
"PS. We are a casual group. Please DO NOT bring a suit and tie! You will be doing a lot of walking around on Friday, so nice comfortable clothes and shoes are in order."
and hotel is already booked. woot!
Click to expand...

that's hot. i'd wear a fitted just to be unique.



i'm about to break 1000 views on my mdapps page. are people stalking me? didn't they just start recording visits since the website switched? wth? it's kinda weird.:wtf:😏
 
jolt21 said:
that's hot. I'd wear a fitted just to be unique.



I'm about to break 1000 views on my mdapps page. Are people stalking me? Didn't they just start recording visits since the website switched? Wth? It's kinda weird.:wtf:😏
Click to expand...

<--1001 :d
 
brooklynblunder said:
blueprint 3 is an okay album
Click to expand...

oh man
THAT SWIZZ BEATZ TRACK IS BANANAS

:banana:

the album starts to get good at that song. i skip all the tracks before it.

and it also confirms my theory that J. Cole > Drake.
 
Last edited:
CielloStelatto said:
ok I think I like UW already. At least the mstp director.

in the email:
"PS. We are a casual group. Please DO NOT bring a suit and tie! You will be doing a lot of walking around on Friday, so nice comfortable clothes and shoes are in order."
and hotel is already booked. woot!
Click to expand...

u should wear one of those cheesehead things
 
brooklynblunder said:
u should wear one of those cheesehead things
Click to expand...

better yet

brett-favre-vikings-jersey.jpg
 
are you guys just posting like crazy in popular threads? or maybe the new one counts more visits because of the multiple pages? dunno
 
Ksmi, I'm with you on the whole "my schools don't want to talk to me" thing. At least you've heard from LSU-NO, I haven't yet and I just want them to talk to me so I can get that scheduled and on my calendar.
Oh well, off to Spanish class.
 
Jolt21 said:
oh man
THAT SWIZZ BEATZ TRACK IS BANANAS

:banana:

the album starts to get good at that song. i skip all the tracks before it.

and it also confirms my theory that J. Cole > Drake.
Click to expand...

i dont know man i kinda got tired of the swizz sound, the track does go hard tho. i feel like i compare everything to his first blueprint which is a classic.

i do like the song with alicia keys about ny tho
 
uh oh. so an admission office sent an email saying that my comittee LOR was not scanned appropriately and its hard to read so they want my school to resend it. its like my worst fear
 
CielloStelatto said:
man, i was right that this thread really delivers. i said i wanted some good news, and within ten minutes I get my first interview!!!! yay!!! I feel so much better now.
Click to expand...

Congrats!!! 👍👍
 
any of you guys have the problem where you have to choose between an early date where you'll be less prepared/practiced and a later date that might be "too late"?

how much do you think it would make a difference to interview last week of september versus first week of november?

cuz i would have a lot of practice/preparation by november, but in september not so much
 
zerial said:
any of you guys have the problem where you have to choose between an early date where you'll be less prepared/practiced and a later date that might be "too late"?

how much do you think it would make a difference to interview last week of september versus first week of november?

cuz i would have a lot of practice/preparation by november, but in september not so much
Click to expand...

do it in sept, it takes literally 1 day to prepare
 
Have a question for u guys. One of my 2ndaries asks to write stuff in bullet points and gives a 600 character limit...when it asks that id assume u dont write like full complete sentances right? like it asks for your role u played in the family...instead of saying like well i worked full time to support my family while taking care of my sick iguana. In addition to this blah blah blah blah

you would just write


  • Worked full-time to support family
  • cared for sick iguana
  • did X activity
etc etc? Sorry im so fail at this lol 🙁🙁. Id assume asking for bullet points means they dont want to read a bunch of BS about how the activity changed your life and just want the straight simple facts?
 
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