the.com/brood
Either your children or your sulking — nature's way of linking the two.
means To brood is to sit heavily on anxious or resentful thoughts, turning them over again and again, the way a hen sits unmoving on her eggs.
from From Old English 'brod', meaning offspring or the act of incubating eggs, itself from a Germanic root tied to warmth and hatching. The literal sense — a bird sitting patiently on her clutch — gave rise by the 1500s to the figurative one: a mind sitting just as fixedly on a dark or worrying thought, refusing to let it hatch or go cold.
- origin
- old english for fetus, same root as breed
- collective noun
- a brood of chickens, specifically
- verb form
- sitting on eggs became sitting on grudges
- peak usage
- teenagers and hens, oddly similar behavior