[samhwr]

> Their tenants were largely about taking care of each other.

For what it’s worth, you almost certainly mean ‘tenets’. I don’t know why, but this malapropism has become increasingly common. Tenants are people who rent a property.

[Tommah]

> I don’t know why

Both words come from the Latin tenere, to hold. A tenant is someone who holds a lease. A tenet is a belief that is held.

[samhwr]

Yeah, after wasting eight years of my life doing Latin at school I understand the basic etymology, but I’m confused because the English meanings aren’t very close. Your careful phrasing manages to get the word ‘hold’ into both of them, but ‘someone who holds a lease’ isn’t a very natural-sounding definition of ‘tenant’, and the notion that most people who make this mistake are familiar with the paradigm of teneo feels rather tenuous (plus ‘tenant’ noticeably isn’t a Latin ending, it’s apparently Old French, though transitively descended from teneo). You don’t think it’s more likely, if anything, to be that they just sound similar?