the_gneech | Happy Birthday, kelloggs2066!

For your present, here's today's Forgotten English (© Jeffrey Kacirk):

texas-tender
The waiter who attends passengers on the upper deck, or "texas," of the Mississippi steamboats.
--John Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms, 1877

On Mississippi steamboats the staterooms were named after the states, and the officers' rooms were the largest.
--Robert Ramsay and Frances Emberson's Mark Twain Lexicon, 1938

200th Anniversary of the Steamboat
On this date in 1807, Robert Fulton's 150-foot paddle wheeler Clermont, the first commercially viable steamboat, began its thirty-two-hour maiden voyage up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany. Fulton, who is sometimes hailed as having invented the steamboat, had more accurately improved on a prototype made by John Fitch, who had in turn harnessed an upgraded version of James Watt's steam engine. Fitch's model had been demonstrated on the Delaware River twenty years earlier, but had not proven itself reliable. Fulton's short voyage marked an important change in commercial navigation, which, by the end of the century, would jettison wind power for petroleum-based sources of locomotion.

Seems very appropriate for ol' Scotty, somehow!

-The Gneech