Canvassing for Votes

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Suzanne Taylor calling from New York City.

Well, hi, Suzanne. How are you doing?

I’m well, thanks.

I have a question for you guys having to do with a word that I have been reading that seemed to be timely given the recent election.

I have been reading The Duchess, the book on which the recent movie starring Keira Knightley, I guess, is based.

And there is an awful lot of talk in this book about the Duchess canvassing for her favorite political candidate, I guess, for the Whig party in her case in England.

And it’s the word canvas with two S’s at the end, and they use it in many different contexts.

They talk about her and her friends being canvassers.

They talk about them going out canvassing.

They talk about all sorts of things having to do with canvassing.

And I was reading it in the last week and the week before and during all this election stuff and thought to myself, well, I guess they’re still doing canvassing.

But I wonder where the word canvassing comes from and what does it have to do with the other kinds of canvas that I’m aware of, like ship’s canvas and painter’s canvas, and are they connected in any way?

So I thought I’d call you.

It’s a really good question.

And the answer is a little bit tricky.

I’m not sure we understand it completely.

I can tell you about the connection between canvas, the noun, and the verb, though.

The word canvas itself, the cloth that you mentioned, which is made out of either flax or cotton or hemp, goes back to a Latin word for hemp that will be familiar to some of our listeners.

It’s cannabis.

Okay.

So we get the word canvas from cannabis in Latin.

Now, that’s where it starts to get tricky because if you look at the earliest definitions of canvas, like back as far back as 1508, the idea is to toss somebody in a canvas sheet.

You know, people holding the sheet at the four corners and lifting it so people go flying up in the air.

Like as a game, not as a safety for a fireman’s net.

Exactly. As a game or punishing somebody.

Punishment.

Yeah.

Okay.

But my sense is that it sort of went from jostling and shaking something up because early, early on in the 1500s, you see people talking about canvassing scripture or canvassing somebody’s words.

And I think the idea is sort of jostling and shaking up to see what’s really there.

And I can see how that might have been extended metaphorically to mean sort of going out into the community to see what’s there politically.

Does that work for you, Grant?

I mean, I know there’s another explanation that might be the case.

The other explanation seems more likely to me, and it’s that canvas was used to sift.

You can see how you might sift through, say, flour or sand or something to get the big objects out of it.

And I think that there’s something we said for the metaphorical uses of sifting through ideas and looking for the good ones or sifting through your thoughts and trying to make sense of them that might easily have gone from a literal use of sift, referring to the canvas, to a metaphorical use of sift.

Yeah, so traditionally people used canvas as a sift, sort of like a coffee filter or something.

Wow.

Etymology is a bit of an art rather than a science, so they all have their opinions, and they sound so authoritative when you read them.

You’re like, oh, that must be it.

And then you go to another dictionary, and they sound authoritative.

You’re like, wait a second, these don’t agree.

The difficulty that they all have, Suzanne, is that none of them have successfully explained how the idea, either using the canvas for the game of throwing people about or for sifting, came to be used in a political sense to mean go door-to-door to solicit votes.

There’s a kind of a weird idea that if you go door-to-door, you are exposing your candidate’s ideas to the potential voter, and they are doing the sifting through the ideas to decide if they want to vote for that person.

And I end that on a high-questioning note because I’m not certain that that’s right.

I don’t know.

I kind of like the idea of putting a candidate on a canvas and tossing them up in the air and just seeing how they do.

Seeing how they fare.

Yeah.

You know, we should elect our presidents that way.

I think we should.

It would be a lot less trouble.

Yeah, a lot cheaper.

Instead of two years of campaigning, we could do it in like about 10 minutes.

And for about 10 bucks.

It’d be great.

Definitely save money.

That’s great.

Yeah.

Well, Suzanne, thanks for an interesting question.

Sure.

Thank you.

That was a fascinating and unexpected answer.

We’d love to hear that.

Great. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you’ve got a puzzle or you want something that’s solved, Martha’s the one to call. I’ll just make a muddle of it.

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