Tender

The word tender weirds me out a bit.  It has a bunch of different meanings, none of which seem to have much to do with each other, yet there's a certain subcurrent of association running beneath the surface that is barely detectable.  It makes me uneasy.

When I first started studying medicine I was surprised at how often we were taught to check if patients had tenderness in the area we were examining.  To me, tenderness is something that a delicious steak has.  Even onions are often recommended to be cooked until tender.  Conflating patients with food is odd, yet it comes up surprisingly often, especially in pathology.  Fortunately I have yet to see doctors advised to check to see if an inserted skewer come out clean.

So what is the tenderness that patients feel anyway?  Is it the same tenderness that a mother feels towards her baby?  No, it's a feeling a pain.  But not pain, really.  It's a feeling of having to be ginger (whoops, there's the food again) with a part of your body.  It's not necessarily even discomfort.  It's more of a feeling of being well-used, an excessive awareness of your own self.

But the tender feelings we have towards (say) a little baby seal are almost the reverse of this.  It's the feeling of wanting to protect and nurture, as if the little baby seal itself was feeling a bit tender.  Join the club, I say.

Then there are the tenders that you put in to win a contract - it's as if you're doing it slightly reluctantly because it might hurt.  Oooh, preparing this bid has made me a bit tender.  And the little boats that race around carrying people to and from ocean liners.  Those are tenders but they aren't very tender.  Nor do ocean liners line the ocean for that matter.  The whole area of nautical jargon is opaque to me actually.  I think I'd understand life better if I knew more about lee winds and sheepshanks.  But that's a topic for another time.

Woo!  Just went to look at the most excellent online etymological dictionary and found a whole bunch of stuff about the word "tender", including that the word "bowels" derives from a word meaning "sausages".  Go educate yourselves and report back with any questions or handy hits about cheese selection.