BURNING QUESTION

[telophase]

You have a river. On this river are barges, among other river-type boats carrying passengers and cargo. There are no locks on this river. The barges need to stop at places to tie up for the night.

What are these places called? Docks Piers? Moorings? Barge stops? Something else? If you were going to meet someone there, you'd say "Meet me at the ______?"

YOU'D THINK THIS WOULD BE AN EASY GOOGLE.

----

In other news, we're bearing up from the events of last week and missing Nefer. Sora is weirded out because That Other Cat is Not Here, and because myrialux and I dealt with our feelings by vigorously Kondo-ing our spare bedroom and its closet, and getting rid of or re-homing the crap left in our master bedroom after we Kondoed the master closet a few months back, so Things Are Not In The Same Place. Other than that, he's pretty much fine because they never got along all that well.

I have moved the house-shaped cat bed that Nefer used to sleep in next to my head, because I have to admit I'd really hated it being there, but it was the best solution to keeping the cats from fighting over me at night. Sora had gotten it during the day as part of their timeshare arrangement, and I found him curled up on the spot where the house had been the next day, so now I move his house to that spot during the day, and move it back to the foot of the bed at night.

For the first few days, I think Sora was expecting Nefer to show up, because one day he and I were sitting on the couch when something in the kitchen--I think it was the icemaker--made a series of soft noises that were roughly similar to the way her claws clicked on the floor, and he immediately sat up and started sniffing the air in a suspicious manner, and then slunk off. Hasn't happened since, though.

Mornings and evenings are the hardest.

Comments

[yhlee]

I think ckd knows Boat Terms because he corrected me on something of Boat Nature regarding the differences between quays/docks/piers/???. I can ask him, if you like.

*hugs*

[telophase]

That would be nice.

Thank you. :)

[yhlee]

I've pinged him. :)

[telophase]

+1 :D

[ckd]

And yet apparently the grid I thought was definitive...wasn't quite as definitive as that.

See the very long comment thread on
http://languagehat.com/wharf-quay-pier-jetty/ for more than you ever wanted to know about the disagreements over these terms (and what were the most influential record albums...it makes sense in context).

I suspect that in a developed river transport economy, the overnight stops would be developed with piers (where the river was deep in the center but shallow along the shoreline) or quays/embankments that allow boats/barges to tie up right at the water's edge (created by some combination of dredging and building the shoreline out to navigable depth).

In colloquial American English, though, "meet me at the dock" or "I'll be docked nearby" would probably cover all of those cases well enough.

[telophase]

haha, thank you! I get the feeling, from reading that thread, that no matter what I used, 1/3 of readers wouldn't notice what I called it, 1/3 would go "Yes, that's correct," and 1/3 would immediately compose angry letters about how the terminology is All Wrong.

This thing that I'm writing is fantasy, and set in a place that's vaguely Italy-ish Renaissance-ish, so I probably have a lot of leeway in what to call the location the characters are meeting.

(Gah, this location exists for, like, six paragraphs in one scene, but my brain is stuck on YOU MUST FIND THE RIGHT THING TO CALL IT even though it's a draft. But for now, they're meeting where the barges dock.)

Thank you!

[movingfinger]

Quays is my understanding. You could look into the usage in the UK canal system and the French canal system, although canal boats are not quite the same as a barge (a barge implies freight). I recall that in Stockholm at least the places where ferries arrived and departed were jetties, but those are ferries, not barges.

[telophase]

It's set in a vaguely Italian area, and from my cursory Googling, "il pontile" is translated as wharf, jetty, dock, or pier, so: heh. XD Not putting random Italian in, though, so I think I'll probably end up going with "dock" as per ckd above.

[lilysea]

You have a river. On this river are barges, among other river-type boats carrying passengers and cargo. There are no locks on this river. The barges need to stop at places to tie up for the night.

What are these places called? Docks Piers? Moorings? Barge stops? Something else? If you were going to meet someone there, you'd say "Meet me at the ______?"

As an Australian, my first thought is "jetty" or "jetties"

[telophase]

It seems that the terminology for these areas turns out to be highly regional, and all over the place. I expect that whatever I pick, someone will tell me it's the wrong term. XD

[athenejen]

I think this is one of those bits of terminology that tends to be quite region-specific. In the US, my impression (from having lived near lots of lakes, rivers, and oceans in several different parts of country, and from looking at a lot of maps for various reasons) is that "dock" is probably the most-used general-purpose term (can pretty much be used, at least colloquially, for anywhere boats dock, where dock is a verb), with pier, wharf, jetty, and quay all still in use, but usually referring to specific sub-types of structures (pier, wharf, jetty) and/or much more localized (quay).

[telophase]

Yeah, I'm thinking that 'dock' is going to be the bet option for now. :)