Word: tenderfeet
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...would want young men," said Capt. Robert Bartlett, last week, "tenderfeet, enthusiastic as hell . . . college trained men . . . with their background and enthusiasm they would know what to do when we got there." He was discussing his plan to man a saucer-shaped ship, sail it north of Bering Strait, let it freeze into the ice, then wait three or four years while the ship drifted with the ice floes over the North Pole and down into the Atlantic Ocean...
...latest Standard Dictionary gives "tenderfeet" only for the plural of "tenderfoot." However, Webster's International is the authority by which TIME goes, and this dictionary prefers "tenderfoots...
That is something another national weekly (the ? ?*) will not do. Some time since, in answer to a correspondent somewhere in Iowa, this periodical stated: "Tenderfeet is wrong; the proper plural of Tenderfoot is Tenderfoots...
...immediately wrote to the editor stating that I had lived in the West for 38 years and had heard the expression hundreds of times, and that the proper plural is "Tenderfeet." To be sure I submitted the matter to a dinner club of 25 gentlemen? lawyers, doctors, professors, bankers and businessmen?who had all lived in the West ten to twenty years or more. They were all familiar with the use of the word "tenderfoot" to designate some one newly arrived and green to the ways of the West, and they were all agreed that "tenderfeet" was the only plural...
Brave, boyish Janet Rawley and her brutishly neurasthenic spouse, Jack, are about to plunge into African shrubbery on a safari for game and gold. Capt. James Antrim, of the King's African Rifles, splendid fellow that he is, cannot bear to see such ill-mated tenderfeet wandering loose among the lions, thirst and loneliness. He turns in his steamer ticket from Mombasa to England, takes command for and of the Rawleys, gets the safari past the usual vile German agent and as far as a highland camp, three weeks from nowhere. Here fever, whiskey, manslaughter, flies and love descend...