Pensive

When I write things move along pretty quickly.  I am after all approaching 3000 of these casual essays, so they clearly don't take all that much effort.  So I'm seldom if ever pensive when at the keyboard.

Pensive.  An interesting word.  It can mean "sad, sorrowful" or alternatively, "meditative, contemplative".  I guess there is some linkage, although I prefer to contemplate and to meditate on, happy thoughts.   

Over the years pensive meandered through various French words such as pensif, but ultimately it comes from the Latin.  Pensare, "to weigh or consider."  Or also "to hang or cause to hang".

This makes perfect sense archaologically.

A few years back I was excavating down in the layers of perfect preservation and came up with parts of a Roman weighing device.  

This was your basic scale, where there would be pans on either chain.  You'd put a known weight on one side - I've found a couple of those over the years too - and the object to be weighed on the other.  These chain and pan gadgets hung down, or were "dependent".  In fact anything that hangs down could be called a pendent.  

The other meaning for Pensare has also made it to the modern world.  When something is left hanging it could be said to be pending.  To get back to the darker sense of pensive, something that is both hanging and unpleasant could be impending.  Something attached to something else is said to be appended.  Let's hope if you ever have a vague achy sensation in your lower abdomen it is not appendicitis!

Ah, hard to think anything but happy thoughts on a cold winter day....but with spring and warm sunshine in the trenches not too many weeks off.....