Today’s episode brought to you by my audio-book Global Wording - The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English . Available in downloadable form from iTunes or Audible.com or as a CD from bookstores. For more information and a few samples, go to www.globalwording.com Here’s a word with a lot of meanings and an unusual history. You can canvass for votes—which means you want people to vote for your candidate; or you can canvass public opinion—meaning you’re taking a survey; or canvassing can mean examining or discussing something thoroughly. But canvas also means the fabric used for the sails of a boat.  It seems that the voting and surveying canvass grew out of the sailing canvas, although exactly how isn’t completely clear. There are a few theories. It was once a form of punishment to get someone onto a sheet of canvas so that a bunch of other people could hoist it up and bounce the victim around a bit.  Sort of like a trampoline that you have no control over.  Back in 1508 this lead to canvass as a verb meaning to inflict this treatment. Over the next few centuries to canvass seemed to split in at least two directions, one with a meaning of shaking things out to examine them carefully; the other to criticize destructively. One theory is that people canvass for votes by criticizing their opponent and so that’s how the word gained its new meaning. A less likely theory is that a piece of canvas can be used sort of like a sieve through which the facts and arguments can be strained. Although I don’t see it in any of the dictionaries it would seem logical to me that you’d use canvas to sort things out just as a broad clean surface upon which to work; you see it every day in markets where people spread their wares out on a tarpaulin. The sense of punishing someone as relates to canvas does not come from the use of canvas as the flooring in a boxing ring since the sense of punishment is 500 years old while the first citation we have for canvas in boxing is from 1910. So now we know that to canvass for votes is etymologically related to the canvas in a ship’s sail.  But the word goes quite a bit further back than that, and takes another unexpected turn. The fabric that is called canvas got its English name back in 1260 from French and the word had originally been a Latin word referring to the plant from which this fabric was made. That plant was hemp and it’s Latin name is cannabis. So canvas is actually just a morphed pronunciation of cannabis. Less