"Tent," "Tensive," "TENACIOUS," "THIN," "Tone"

       Now in the rudimentary, physical sense, how does one stretch something without holding on to it?  And that is the change in the small move of Indo-European ten- into Latin tenere.  Tenere means “to hold, keep, maintain.”   And it gives us words like “tenure,” “tenable,” “tenacious,” and also “tenor,” a singer who “holds” the melody, and “maintain,” through French from Latin meaning “to hold in the hand” (manus).
  
       But what happens when something is stretched by hand or otherwise?  It becomes thinner, another move to another set of derivatives.  From Latin tenuis (“thin, rare, fine”) we have “tenuous” and “attenuate” with this sense of “stretched thin.”