A tense situation

A tense situation

A familiar meaning of the verb tense is "to become nervous, or uneasy" (definition courtesy WordNet), with its noun form as tension. In English, one would use these words in a sentence as:

"I became tense as I saw the dog with the foaming mouth approach."
"There was a lot of tension among the members."

So far so good. In day-to-day Hindi, we use such borrowed words instead of say "tanaav" or "tanaavgrast" (CFILT) as:

"Geeta bahut tense lag rahii thii"
(literally: 'Geeta very tense looked')
"aap kyo.n tension lete hai.n?"
(literally: 'You why tension take?')

However, from what I seen on Tamil television, the colloquial usage there is stranger. Instead of using the verb form "tense", people seem to use the noun form "tension". Like:

"nii yEn tension aaharai?"
(literally: you why tension become?)

In Hindi, you would say: "tum kyo.n tense hotii ho" ("why do you become tense?"). But to become "tension" itself - now, that's weird. I never hear "nii yen tense aaharai?", nor can I remember hearing the "why do you take tension?" version that one hears in Hindi and Marathi.

I wonder how this began, and what it is in the Tamil grammatical structure or language that has caused this to happen.