Legal tender? I wondered, and with my face in that soft doughnut thing I started wondering about the word TENDER.
TENDER means soft, or easily broken. I found out that it comes from the Latin tener/ tenerum with cognates in all the Romance languages. This word was very popular in describing youth and femininity, both of which were long considered soft by nature. A 1382 translation of Deut. 28:56, renders its description of the terrible curses that will follow if the people do not follow God's laws, saying that even "A tendre womman and a delicate" will begin to begrudge the husband she loves. That word today ("rakh" in Hebrew) is today most often rendered in English as "gentle."
If "tender" is no longer so often used to describe women, however, it is still commonly used to refer to youth, often in the phrase "tender age." In fact, the Hebrew phrase "ha-gil ha-rakh" or "the tender age" using the same word "rakh" as in the verse from Deutoronomy cited above, is the common term used in modern Hebrew for preschool aged children.
John Keats famously used the phrase "Tender is the Night" in his 1819 poem "Ode to a Nightingale:
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
F. Scott Fitzgerald used the line as the title of his 1934 novel.
None of this, to my knowledge, has anything to do with legal tender, or, for that matter, to the use of TENDER, to refer to a truck. In modern Hebrew, I should point out, the word tender is the usual word for a pick-up truck. What's up with that? We'll get to that in a second.
But first: on back of our dollar bills there is the phrase, "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." Is it tender like my muscles? It turns out, no, it is from a different Latin root.
TENDER in this sense (and, interestingly, in the truck sense also) is from a very common Latin stem, tendere, meaning "stretch," the same one that gives us tend, extend, tendency, tendril, intend, and others. Interestingly, of all of these forms, tender is the only one that preserves the "er" ending of the Latin and the French through which the verb came into English. It is relatively rare for Latin-French verbs to preserve these -ar/-er/-ir endings in English.
to tender (v.) is to offer formally, i.e. to stretch out one's hand with something. Thus we have the phrases "to tender one's resignation" or "to tender an oath." In the sense of money, it means to present formally to satisfy a debt or liability. The noun, that which is offered in such an offer, comes from the verb and seems to date from as early as the 16th century, but the OED has "legal tender" only from 1740.
So what about the trucks?
Back to the root "tend": to tend to someone is to stretch out one's hand to help them. Thus, a "tender" is anyone who helps someone else (a nurse, attendant). By extension, the term came to be used for a vehicle that helps out another vehicle. By the late 17th or early 18th century, tender was being used to refer to a small ship that was employed to attend to a larger ship. London Gazette, 1675: "Here are arrived five Dutch Men of War, and four Tenders." The British Royal Navy then started using this term for a vessel commissioned to act (in any capacity) under the orders of another vessel.
By the 19th century, a tender was a small ship used to carry goods or passengers from a larger vessel, often when that larger vessel wasn't able to reach the shore. This usage was then extended to trains, where the tender became a carriage specially constructed to carry fuel and water for a locomotive engine. Tenders were also names for support vehicles used by the British during World War I--some of the better known were the one's produced by Crossley Motors: the Crossley Tenders.
We can start to see here how "tender" could be the name for a vehicle used to carry things around. But the use of "tender" for a pick-up truck seems to be present only in Hebrew. The British apparently used Crossley Tenders as part of their police force while they were in control of Palestine between World War I and 1948 and, after it was adopted into Hebrew, came to be used as the standard name for a pickup truck.
These kinds of tenders were important enough in the legacy of Jewish settlement in Palestine, specifically around Jewish attempts to protect Jewish settlements, that the tender entered the Hebrew cultural tradition in the form of a 1939 song, "Ha-tender nose'a" (The Tender Drives)," which had several versions. You can listen to several of them here.
Here's a translation of the chorus of one the versions, from 1939, by Yaakov Orland:
The tender drives, the tender runs along here.
From the shores of the Dead Sea to Ein Ha-Mifratz [in the North]
The night, the night is dark.
The tender--what is one night from another?
The tender--open your mouth in song
Our heart is wide and young.
With fire before us and fire behind.
The tender! Don't stop!
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