I'll be cautious in what I say about
rend from now on, having just provided a defence of its rare status, when it is in fact classed as common. I agree with you, TRex, that the word generally conveys a sense of forcible ripping apart, but I do still feel it has a dated or poetic flavour. To me, it is close to the borderline between common and rare, but on the test of whether most people playing the game are likely to know of the word, it probably passes, and so is justified as a common word.
As for
pend, it has a few meanings, most of them archaic (an arch or vaulted passage, pressure, to pen in, or confine), but I presume you are thinking of the meaning related to
pending - to remain undecided - or perhaps the meaning, to hang. (Actually, birdy, the Oxford says that
pending was derived directly from the French
pendant, by a process of Anglicization, while the use of
pend to mean "treat as pending" is described as a colloquial back-formation.)
In any of its uses, I think
pend is quite rare. In the 385 million-word
Corpus of Contemporary American English, I found only one example: "That is supposed to eliminate 'submarine' patents, which pend for years while inventors deliberately amend their applications to keep up with advancing technologies." (From a 1995
New York Times article.) The British National Corpus has a couple of examples of the arch or vaulted passage usage, and nothing else. So I think pend probably belongs in the rare category.
And so does that handbag thing.