Sep 10 2001
House-holding Tendencies
essay by Brian Charles Clark
As a tenant in the house of English I have a tender spot in my heart for the histories of the words I live with. Many of the histories of our words are tenuous, at best, while others form thick tendons of literature. The prolific descendants of the Indo-European root forms of *ten- have given rise to tenacious tendril-like histories that, in Modern English, tend to stem from the Latin verbs tendere, meaning “to stretch”, and tenere, “to hold.” These few opening sentences give the tenor of many of the *ten- words we regularly use: tenant, tender, tenuous, tendon, tenacious, tendril, tend, and tenor. [OED, Am.Her.Dic.]
From the first century BC Latin writer Horace we hear tenere in the sense of “holding with strength”: “Iustum et tenacem propositi virum…” (“For a just man and one with a firm grip of his intentions…”) [OxQ, 260:18], where tenacem modified by virum has the sense of “manly tenacity.” Tenere’s holdings in the Romance languages are vast, especially with suffixation (e.g., ex- and in-). This gripping wealth of words came into English with the Norman conquest, and, as the following examples illustrate, we’ve held close to the original meanings ever since.
It was the sense of “landholder”, and the history of the word “farm” that led me to “tenant.” While the original feudal-agriculturist sense of the word is fast fading, “tenant” still holds the idea of paying rent. Originally, though, a tenant was both one who holds (land or rights to something, the tenant’s tenements), and one who is held, as in “a feudal tenant.” Thus, in late thirteenth-century England, one might quite likely have a “fraunc tenaunt” [OED] as lord and master, and yet be a tenant oneself, as in Wyclif’s 1388 translation of Job 19:15: “The tenauntis of myn hows…” [ibid.] The relationship is not in the owning of the land, but in the holding of it; the OED describes this distinction in early English law in tenacious detail. The broader sense of “to occupy” comes a few centuries later: “To the cold humble hermitage Not tenanted but by discoloured age” [ibid., quoting Harington, 1634].
Many English words convey the sense of tenere: “Ye that … intend to lead a new life…” [OxQ, 387:18]. To “intend” is “to hold to a plan or goal” in the Invitation to the Prayer Book of 1662. “Unless an age too late, or cold Climate or years damp my intended wing” [OxQ, 349:10]. Milton, in his Paradise Lost of 1667, means to “hold to my chosen course” with his lovely “my intended wing.” Other things we hold are opinions “tenets” and other psychological patterns that we lump together as “tendencies.”
Another inherited sense of *ten- is that of “stretching.” To offer or “tender” something for sale is a branch off the *ten- onto the tendere trunk. This sense of tender is via Old French tendre, “to offer,” “to stretch out,” and a source, with or without suffixation, of a plethora of English words [Am.Her.Dic.]. Note, though, that “to feel tender” is from a different Latin word, tener, meaning “delicate,” but is descended from the Indo-European ten- [ibid.]. Late nineteenth-century poet Rudyard Kipling has his Gunga Din testing or stretching his soul as “’e went to tend the wounded” [OxQ, 299:17] by using the shorter form of “attend.” Latin attendere, “to attend” also gives us “attention,” which has vernacular kin in the phrase “to stretch one’s mind” or “a stretch of the imagination.”
The neglected French philosopher Charles Fourier wrote in 1808: “L’extension des privileges des femmes est le principe general de tous progres sociaux” [OxQ, 217:18]. L’extension … des femmes, “the extension of rights to women”, via Latin extendere, here has the sense of “stretching” or “retrofitting” the concept of social inclusion. We could stretch for an anatomical word and say that, for his day, Fourier had muscular ideological “tendons.” However, according to most scholarly assessments, Fourier pitched his “tent” (stretched fabric) and didn’t hold to the “tenor” of his times.
