In many locales in the US, governments have imposed moratoriums on evictions so that people who had financial hardship during the pandemic couldn’t be evicted for not paying rent. The idea was to help prevent people from losing their homes, and per the CDC, to help slow down the spread of the virus.
A formal eviction is a legal proceeding. For example, here in Seattle, to evict a tenant, a landlord must file a civil lawsuit. During the moratorium, landlords could initiate eviction proceedings if the tenant wasn’t paying rent, but tenants couldn’t actually be evicted until the moratorium expired.
A lot of landlords weren’t happy about this. I learned a new word this week (from a tweet by the editor JoAnne Dyer) that captures how they’ve gotten around this moratorium: they use informal evictions. If a landlord can’t get a court order to evict a tenant, they might try a variety of other techniques. They might just tell the tenant to leave; they might change the locks; they might remove the tenant’s possessions from the property; they might offer the tenant cash to leave; or they might threaten to call authorities (for example, immigration) if the tenant doesn’t leave. Basically, they “encourage” the tenant to leave without a formal proceeding.
The term informal eviction isn’t new. I found it used in a book about homelessness from 1997, but they used it in a way that suggested it was already known to their readers. I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes back considerably longer than that. The instances I found were primarily in scholarly papers about housing and homelessness; I first saw it on a web page from the University of Washington. I didn’t get any hits for instances in popular media, but that could be me not searching right. Anyway, as noted, it has currency again while formal evictions are possibly still on hold.
Origins. One of the delights of exploring word origins is finding words that are unexpectedly related. A recent tweet by the linguist Julianne Doner got me onto the trail of the word cannabis. This word has a straightforward etymology: we got it from Latin, which borrowed it from Greek. An interesting little note about the word is that it probably originally came from a language that is now extinct; the usual source is given as Scythian or Thracian.
The word cannabis has an English equivalent: hemp. Many people probably know that Cannabis sativa, the pot plant, is also the hemp plant. (There are different strains of the plant that are cultivated for different pharmacological and industrial purposes.)
But the names are also directly related as words. The Greeks got the word kánnabis from Scythian or Thracian or wherever; the early Germanic tribes borrowed the same word from the same source. However, due to some phonological shenanigans, the initial k sound became an h sound in the Germanic languages. (Similarly, Latin centum, pronounced “ken-tum,” shows up in English as hundred, and the k/h relationship between kánnabis and hemp might be the same thing.[1])
In Old English, hemp has an n in the middle (henep), which corresponds to the n sound in kánnabis. But by the 1400s, the word is consistently spelled with an m in the middle. I haven’t found an explanation for this, but two possibilities suggest themselves. This shift of n to m happened in the Scandinavian languages also (Old Norse hampr), so the Viking influence on English might have played a role. It’s also possible that as the second vowel in henep disappeared, speakers started pronouncing the word as hemp because it’s easier to say m+p than n+p. (A process known as assimilation; the same process produces sammich for sandwich.)
Update (30 Jul 2021): Someone alerted me to the blog entry High Times: Grimm’s Law turns cannabis into hemp in four easy steps by Dennis Baron (@DrGrammar on Twitter) that explains the phonological relationship between cannabis and hemp. I’m pleased to see that I pretty much got the derivation of hemp right.
One more wrinkle. Another cousin in this little family reunion is the word canvas. We got this from French canevaz, meaning “made from hemp.” French got it from Latin cannabāceus, an adjectival form of cannabis. Once you see this, it all makes sense: canvas was originally a cloth made from hemp fiber. Because we got canvas from a different source than hemp, the word canvas retains its initial k and that mid-word n.
So we have three different words in English that all come from the same great-great-grandparent, which all got to us today via different paths. And which all still show a family resemblance. Isn’t genetics etymology cool?
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
__________
[1] This sure seems like an example of Grimm’s Law, but I’m not sure, so I’m tucking this thought into a footnote.[^]