Sounds just like my thrashers, Janet.
(Actually the verb's inapt there, but you get the idea.)

A century or more ago, silent, sullen, & morose ("depressed" we'd say now)
people were not said  to have the "blues," they were described as being in a
"brown study".   

Perhaps our thrashers are just Victorian anachronisms.

Where else you gonna get such wonderfully misguided erudition?

Leo Weigant