Oh, to be a wordsmith and own something known by a name that's not in the dictionary or encyclopedia. How can that be?
Over the last two months I hosted two Open Houses, taking more than 60 friends and neighbors on a tour of my new place, and when I would get to the tenderhouse -- a floating shed on the opposite side of the walkway -- and say, blah, blah, and this is the tenderhouse, inevitably people would ask "The what?" or "Where did that name come from?"
Being a wordsmith, of course I eventually got around to looking it up.
But to my disbelief ...
Neither tenderhouse nor tender house is in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
Nor in the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Nor, oddly enough, could I find a definition via Google searching through a multitude of combinations of words.
A tender, of course, is a small boat that tends to a larger ship. Or, as Merriam says, ""A ship employed to attend other ships (as to supply provisions)" and "a boat or small steamer for communications between shore and a larger ship." But that's not what our tenderhouses are.
If I just googled "tenderhouse" I would get a ton of links to a website called tenderhouse.com written in a language that looked eastern European.
If I googled "tenderhouse""floating home" I would get a bunch of real estate ads for floating homes on sale, and it would give the dimensions of the tenderhouse included in the sale.
I tried "tender's house." I tried "tenderhouse" "Floating" and what all else I can't recall.
Finally, I got to a county document of regulations that included "Chapter 15.16 Moorages and floating structures code."
In the list of definitions was this:
"Tender house means a noninhabitable, floating accessory building."
Some day I shall come upon a proper source.
Lovely.
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