WHELMED (2025-5)

Our friend Brian is the definition of a real catch. He’s kind, charming, brilliant, insightful, devoted and good looking, besides being super accomplished but not particularly impressed with his own notable accomplishments. He’s had a stellar career as a well-respected attorney in New York, but decided after his wife was killed in a tragic hotel fire that he would focus his energy and talent in more eternal areas. So, after raising his young sons, he went back to Yale Divinity School and earned his Master’s Degree in Divinity. He now serves as Chaplain in a New York Hospital. He’s exactly the kind of person I would want to comfort and advise me if my family and I were in some sort of medical crisis. He has maintained his good humor through all the muddy waters his life experience has thrown him into.

A good handful of years ago we were visiting with him and other buddies from Dave’s years at Yale. Sitting at one of those old worn wood tables, sprawled in the dimly lit dining room at the Yale Club of New York, we got to chatting about his comings and goings. It had been a number of years since his wife had died. 

“How’s your love life?” I asked.

“Well, I recently dated a most charming woman. She’s widowed as well. I really liked her, and thought we were quite well suited for each other.”

“And…?” I queried, “what happened?”

He waved his head to the side and shrugged his shoulders.

“She found me resistable.”

I giggled.

Her name was Katie Couric. Yes… THAT Katie Couric, the former sweetheart of Good Morning America. She’s happily married to someone else now.

The idea of being resistible took my mind to other terms based on root words rarely used without their modifiers.

I got to wondering if there is such a word as “whelm”. We speak of being overwhelmed and underwhelmed, but I don’t remember hearing people use the term whelm in conversation.

Google Search.

Indeed, there is a “whelm” in the dictionary. It means:

To be engulfed or buried.

In fact, overwhelm is a bit redundant. I guess being engulfed wasn’t enough to really hit the emotional mark. It used to work, centuries ago. A ship was merely whelmed at sea. Basically, it sunk. 

The concept of making the worst even worse, or conversely the best even better, reminded me of the day I was sitting in the recording studio with my friend Mark Stephenson, who engineered and produced the last four or five albums I recorded. The way it goes is that an artist will lay down a track or multiple tracks, give a listen, sometimes sit on it for a while, then go back in and fix what needs fixing or re-recording. I had come back in to re-record part of what we had called the final track. I chuckled, in an attempt to overcome my embarrassment that “final” wasn’t really final.

“Oh, this isn’t anything,” Mark assured me, “I have another client whose files look like this:

Raw track. Edited track. Final Track. Final Final track. Gold Final Track. Platinum final Track. True Final Track. True Final Track 2. True Final Track (for real), Really True Final Track. Absolutely true final track.

Poor Mark. We artists must whelm him. Like, super-duper over the top ridiculously massively totally overwhelm him with our expectations. Such behavior must make us totally resistible.