Dank Etymology: The Middle English Origins of Whomst
By: Cody Wiesner
Tags: Memes, Whomst, Language, Etymology, Linguistics

Dank Etymology: The Middle English Origins of Whomst

Few can answer where it came from or what it means.

Each year, Merriam-Webster chooses just one monumentally important word to represent the dictionary and our current language practices. The winner is crowned Word of the Year as all eyes watch. 2019’s “they,” 2018’s “justice,” and 2017’s “feminism” are tough acts to follow, but for me, there’s only one choice for 2020.

Whomst.

And to show you why, one need look no further than to the linguist’s best friend, Urban Dictionary. Here, whomst is “for when you want to ask ‘who or whom,’ but need a fancier connotation.” Looking at another definition on the site, it turns out such connotations are saved for only the most genteel inquiries such as, “Whomst the fuck calls laundry sauce ‘detergent’?” And if you want to crank the fanciness up to 11, just stack increasingly complex contractions right on top. Whomst’ve? Whomst’d’ve?? Whomst’d’ve’ly’yaint’nt’ed’ies’s’y’es??? (Be careful with the final one, though! There’s only so much spirituality the human mortal can comprehend before the brain explodes.)

I love whomst. It makes me feel fancy as I scroll through my dank memes and vindicated in my sarcastic remarks to my pretentious enemies. As whom gradually shifts out of modern English usage, people are increasingly seeing the word as archaic and ornamental, a sort of “intelligent-ese” (unlike linguists, non-linguists tend to make direct associative judgments between the use of big words and book smarts). Thus, to use whom today is to put oneself at risk of sounding stuffy and pretentious. Whomst, then, can be seen as a parody of whom. Is “whom” not a smart enough word for you? Just add a syllable to instantly gain 10 IQ points. Directed at ourselves, whomst is quirky and self-deprecatory; directed at others, it’s a message that they might not be as smart as they think.

But what in the world is whomst? No one’s quite sure what to make of it. Few can answer where it came from or what it means. Whomst arrived mysteriously in 2016, but it wouldn’t exist today without linguistic origins going back to the Middle Ages. Let’s delve into the best meme in a millennium.

How Did Whomst? Entering the Interwebs

In the dark times before whomst, we had the “whom” memes, a closely related but not quite as good set of online jokes with the same sarcastic punchline. These jokes were popularized online as early as 2015, but gibes involving the pretentiousness of the word whom is much older, predating the internet. A related set of memes derive from (groan) 4chan and take aim at anonymous internet users who act much smarter than they really are, represented in the brainlet and the Wojak memes. In any case, between the pomposity of whom and a ripe ecosystem of insulting peoples’ intelligence online, whomst had room to grow.

Like many memes and many words, whomst appears to have no one author. In her Medium article two years ago, Jacqueline Marcelo used Google trends to find just one use of whomst prior to 2014 before it resurged in 2017. However, upon further research narrowing Google’s search parameters for “whomst” to before 2014, this was someone’s online username, as opposed to the objective pronoun we know and love. Instead, the first real-time the word appeared comes from that definition on Urban Dictionary on April 21, 2016, but limiting Google search results to between January 2014 and April 21, 2016 reveals no conversational use of whomst by this point.

That wouldn’t come until December 27, 2016. Know Your Meme reports that Instagram user fkinsnapss used the word caption “a video of a man walking with his pants extremely high up on his waist while the X-files theme music played.” While this first usage was significant, it’s also important to recognize that this use of the word is seemingly a nonsequitur and doesn’t seem to invoke the same sarcastic connotation as the later memes we’d see. Therefore, this instance of the word holds a contentious spot in the history of whomst.

But a month later, on January 21st, the first public whomst meme surfaced thanks to Instagram user b3pis. This usage of whomst captured the same tone as the original Urban Dictionary definition, garnered 2,669 likes, and set the standard for whomst usage to come.

Almost immediately, the dark corners of 4chan caught wind and brought whomst into their arsenal, leading to a series of sexually explicit and/or racist memes. Fortunately, the internet has largely forgotten about the problematic whomst association out of 4chan’s maniacal design, to the point where my introduction to the word instead came from the feminist blogosphere. So you probably don’t have to feel bad about keeping whomst in your lexicon as long as you don’t share those memes.

Oh, 4chan, can nothing be pure?

Almost immediately after whomst’s rise to fame came mass confusion lasting to this day. The third-most-popular Google search involving the word is “whomst meaning,” with a number of web surfers asking Reddit and Quora whether “whomst” is a real word. Some, god bless their innocent souls, use the term unironically thinking it’s a real construction of whom. Many have responded that no, it’s not a word, “because it doesn’t exist in the dictionary.” And in one sense, they’re onto something — it’s a made-up word designed to poke fun at whom. It’s also a new word that hasn’t fully found widespread usage. On the other hand, all words are made-up words. In fact, the joke relies on and benefits from longstanding language and usage practices stemming from Old English and timeless practices in phonetics — I think this is something we as dank memers are aware of latently as Native English speakers, so many of our internalized language practices have obscured the comedy GOLD that comes from whomst. As it turns out, we’ve had a number of similar words — “amongst,” “amidst,” “whilst,” — that evolved in a very similar way, and being aware of the linguistic history of the “-st” suffix can help us appreciate whomst in deeper ways.

Ye Olde Whomst? From Genitive Case to Epenthesis

While whomst was born in 2016, it owes its life to some dank language changes happening between the 1200s and 1500s. A number of similar words were coming into wider usage at this time such as amongst, against, betwixt, alongst (RIP), and whilst. To generalize, these changes all occurred during the transition from Old English to Middle English, although they all had slightly different dates and circumstances that prompted their language changes. A more experienced linguist would have a much longer and more complicated explanation than that, but for our purposes, let’s summarize by taking a look at how one of these words changed: amidst.

Amidst started out in Old English as on middan, which literally translates to “in middle” but better translates to “in the middle of.” In the 13th century, this changed to the Middle English word amidde, followed by amyddes, complete with an -s addition. In the late 14th century, we got amid, sans -st, and then the suffix returned in the 15th century. There were a number of variant forms and spellings until being standardized to the “amidst” we know today.

This all begs the question — why in the world did we add the “-st”? As it turns out, Old English on middan and Middle English amidde, amyddes, and amidst all followed the genitive case, something that’s 99.9% obsolete in Modern English. The genitive case is hard to conceptualize as a native modern English speaker, but it has a lot of similarities to possessive pronouns and the possessive case (Sophie’s Choice, pack of cards, etc.) in that they demonstrate an attributive relationship between one word and another. In particular, amidst, amongst, and words like those are adverbial genitives. It’s weird to think of these preposition words as adverbs today, but back in the day, you could frequently just add -s to certain words and bam, you’ve made an adverb. We can see this in the same words today — in the sentence “Amidst the chaos, I saw hope,” we’re seeing this prepositional phrase acting like an adverb detailing the circumstances under which I see.

That explains why the “-s” suffix appeared, but what about the “-t”? Pfft, nobody knows. The Oxford Online Dictionary and Online Etymology Dictionary suspect the “-t” happened “probably by association with superlatives” ending in “-st.” And that kind of makes sense — we have “angry, angrier, and angriest,” and “angriest” kind of sounds like “amongst.” Even though the amidst and amongst series of words absolutely are not superlatives, I can see how people would make that connection and then start saying “amidst” instead of amyddes. Much like whomst today, I can just imagine the 16th century mad lads pronouncing it “amongst” just to troll the plebs who didn’t know the difference between adverbial genitives and superlative adjectives. I mean, come on, how could those fools even show their faces at the jousting tournament after a blunder like that? Shaking mine head.

So “amidst” is a grammatical mutant, made up of an adverbial genitive and a parasitic “-t.” Okay, but then as Middle English shifted into modern English and the genitive case went extinct, why didn’t we start saying “amid” full-time? The possessive case and a few remnant words like “amidst” were all that was left of the genitive case in modern English. The practice of adverbing genitives by adding the “-s” suffix was no more, and did it really make sense to keep this archaic suffix rule that no one remembers for just four words? Apparently, it did. I mean, my archnemesis Grammarly writes that amongst showed up in the Oxford English Corpus 10,000 times versus among’s 300,000, showing a declining but still a wide following of folks who still use the “-st” suffixes, particularly in British English.

The suffixed words, being more archaic, are increasingly seen as ornamental variants, totally frivolous but fun to say. The phonologists might categorize this phenomenon as epenthesis, or the process of adding syllables to a word that don’t ordinarily belong. Sometimes this makes sense to do — those using British English dialects sometimes have more trouble pronouncing “drawing,” so pronouncing it “drawring” is much more natural. And just try not pronouncing Hamtramck, Michigan, as “Hamtramick.” Other times, it’s completely extra, and there’s no real need to add syllables other than to sound dignified. (But hey, I mean, that isn’t to grammar-shame. You do you.)

This is where whomst comes in. Whomst sounds like the other words, but it is not. While amidst and amongst are adverbial genitives, amongst is a mere objective pronoun. And yet, people are adding the -st to whom as though it were in the same category. To me, this just adds a whole new layer of hilarity to an already great meme. The epenthesis in whomst crafts this narrative of the pretentious wordsmith. This is someone who thinks they’re very smart, and they show it by using all kinds of dying words they don’t know how to use. And when “whom” just isn’t enough, they add in this nonsense syllable without realizing that the rules just barely still applying to amongst and amidst have nothing at all to do with whom.

Whilmst Enters the Chat, Continues a Legacy

Whomst really is the stuff of legends, the guy who wears a printed tuxedo t-shirt to an elegant dinner party. But we all love that guy. Whomst is wild and absurd. It pretends to be classy only to go on an expletive-filled rant about how detergent is actually laundry sauce. It’s simultaneously a loving critique and a celebration of the English language and all its idiosyncrasies, and the smoking gun against any big-brained philosophy bro you’ll find on Twitter.

But most of all, I love this long tradition of absurd language changes, of which whomst is not the first, that stem all the way back to the Middle Ages. For some reason, randomly adding a “t” to “amyddes” stuck. For some reason, we decided the “-st” rule from Middle English was so important that we needed to keep it around for four words. For some reason, we decided to parody that by adding “-st” to perhaps the most fancy word in the English language, whom, and create a monster.

And each time it gets even more absurd. The most recent epenthesis I have high hopes for is “whilmst.” Like, what the heck is this abomination? I just love that someone one day thought, “Hmmm, the word ‘whilst’ doesn’t have enough needless syllables, so let’s just throw in the ‘m’ from ‘whomst’ and see what happens.” And oh my god, this is so much worse than whomst, and so much better. It popped up on Twitter last year, and it tends to be used to contrast two things in a playful and sarcastic way.

I only hope “whilmst” gets bigger and bigger, starting an linguistic memetic arms race of increasingly more absurd syllable insertions. Epenthesis is the meme we all needed, and it’s 700 years old. Let’s keep it going.