When you’re considering a choice involving different alternatives, you can be said to be “weighing your options.” “Weighing” in this context means pondering or thinking over carefully. If you take that idea, that “weighing” is “considering,” and you go back a few centuries to when English took a look at Latin and saw a vulnerable territory ripe for conquest, you’ll notice that the Latin word for weighing was “pendere.” Pendere also meant “to hang,” as in drapes, for example, or — more to the point I suppose — as in hanging something from a balance in order to weigh it.
The Latin “pendere” gave us all sorts of English words. “Pendulum,” “pending,” “suspend,” “appendix,” “impending,” and so on. Incidentally, “pent,” as in “pent up,” sounds like it might be part of this group but it isn’t; it’s just a variant of the English word “penned,” as in “catch that goat and put it back in its pen.”
Another word in the “pendere” family tree you might not have run into — unless you happen to read Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Yeomen of the Guard” — is “perpend.” “Perpend” is nearly obsolete, although it’s still used on rare occasions, and formed from “pend” (weigh) and “per,” which here is an intensifier. So “perpend” means to “weigh (consider) very carefully”. The word first appeared in the 1300s.
But that “perpend” is a verb, and there’s also a noun “perpend.” You could say “that wall is perpend,” and if you do, it doesn’t have anything to do with considering anything; it just means vertical, or sometimes at a right angle. THIS “perpend” is a compression of “perpendicular,” and comes from a different root word: the Latin word “perpendicularis.” In masonry there are “perpend stones” that are set perpendicular to others when you’re building a stone wall; they make the wall stronger. If you look carefully at a brick wall you can see the same principle at work; some of the bricks are turned 90 degrees. Actually if you’ve built walls with Legos you might have done the same thing yourself.
You might notice that when “perpend” is used (it usually isn’t) to mean “consider,” it harkens back to the “weigh” meaning of “pendere” — and when it’s used as a noun it’s more closely related to the “hang” meaning of “pendere.” You might even suggest that this puts the noun and verb versions perpendicular to each other (sort of). That’s using the “90 degree rotation” meaning of “perpendicular”, of course.
I failed to fully work in the Gilbert and Sullivan reference until now, so I’m calling attention to it via a literary device sometimes used by Gilbert and Sullivan themselves (and right there I used another one, if you noticed). It is that Jack Point, one of the characters, says “Hold thy peace and perpend.” It sounds at first like he might be telling them to also hold something called a “perpend,” doesn’t it? So you might decide to look up “perpend” to find out what one looks like. And then, as usual, you’d be down another etymological rabbit hole (and rabbit holes are perpendicular to the ground).
