Brooding

Brooding

Does this word – brooding – engender in you a sense of the melancholy or the morose? Suddenly, do you discover your mental meanderings have begun to assume the form of something sullen, rather than celebratory? You realize that this is the inferred contemporary connotation; but “deeply or seriously thoughtful” is wholly acceptable, and dovetails neatly with the earliest known use of the word as a synonym for incubation. So why must we conclude that moody is dark?

Mary Shelley’s novel, “Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus,” may be largely responsible for our modern usage, as the word was first employed with negative inference within her novel. In Chapter 7, Victor’s father cautions his son to abandon “…brooding thoughts of vengeance…”, and again in Chapter 9, Victor recounts his father encouraging him “…to dispel the dark cloud which brooded over me…” The threatening spectre of Shelley’s macabre and foreboding wretch, the “Adam” which is Victor’s sad artifact, would appear to have created for us an indelibly negative sense of the word.

Your preference, however, is to wield the word with less mournful intent, in the way of the hen who broods her eggs, and subsequently marshals her chirping clutch to contented peckish lives, and who is not unhappy in her work. Of course, to be fair, she most probably isn’t thinking much about it either, or planning her hours in advance.