Sunday, September 11, 2005

Whelmed

"I know you can be underwhelmed, and you can be overwhelmed, but can you ever just be, like, whelmed?"
Chastity [Gabrielle Union], 10 Things I Hate About You, 1999

"And why, come to that, can we be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but not semiwhelmed or--if our feelings are less pronounced--just whelmed?
Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue, 1990

As you can see, I know 10 Things I Hate About You isn't original screenwriting 'cause I looked it up. That's one of the skills that I learned in my school.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

10 things i hate about you is loosely based on "taming the shrew." boomshakalaka. boom.

9/18/2005 11:59:00 AM  
Blogger Peter Lynn said...

That's true. I did know that. But I was kind of hoping they were just loosely adapting Shakespeare's plot, and not stealing everything in it from various sources.

9/19/2005 07:51:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Whelmed and overwhlemed both originally meant submerged in water. So you can be whelmed if you're, like, Aquaman. I guess that means underwhelmed means not submerged in water enough, like someone in a bath so shallow that their knees stick out.

10/13/2005 11:36:00 PM  

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