Worth Your Salt

What does it mean to be "worth your salt"? And where does it come from? Why is salt so important as to warrant a starring role in several other proverbs like "the salt of the earth" and "take it with a grain of salt"?

_{Image by onefox - source: Pixabay}

Language is important for obvious reasons, and it's of special interest to us bloggers, journalists, writers in general. Language is all about making known to the world our inner thoughts, emotions, dreams and ideas, and because we have evolved as visual creatures, a picture says more to us than a thousand words; that is why language is full of visual metaphors. Because I deal with language and write on a daily basis, I've become very interested in the origin of words and proverbs. And so I stumbled upon the importance os "salt" when I was looking into the origin of the word "salary".

From Middle English salarie, from Anglo-Norman salarie, from Old French salaire, from Latin salārium ("wages"), the neuter form of the adjective salārius ("related to salt"), from sal ("salt"). There have been various attempts to explain how the Latin term for "wages" came from the adjective "related to salt". It is generally assumed that salārium was an abbreviation of salārium argentum ("salt money"), though that phrase is not attested. A commonly cited theory is that the phrase meant “money consisting of salt”, because Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in salt, but there is no evidence for this from ancient sources. Another is that the phrase meant "money used to buy salt".
_{source: Wikipedia}

Salt is essential in human life; for centuries, before the invention of refrigerators, it was the primary method to preserve food. It could also be used to treat wounds, give taste to food, and was even used as a means of payment. In ancient times, salt was "the white gold". So, to be worth one's salt is to be worth one's pay, to be good at one's job.

_{Image by geralt - source: Pixabay}

Words sometimes have surprising roots. But it's important to realize that language is always evolving, so there's always some earlier version, unless there's something new in the world. So we'll never get to the true origin of most words, because as a species we learned how to speak before we learned how to write. Still it's educational, interesting and sometimes funny to delve down into the history of words.

Did you know, for example, that the word "avocado" came from the Aztec language Nahuatl, word for "testicle"? Or that the word "disaster" actually means something happened under "bad stars"? Or that "Jerry" was ethnic slur for "German" during WW2, and that the Germans were the first to us these metal containers? Try it out, look up some words you've always found silly, sound strange, or generally wondered about: you might be surprised by their origins. To get you started, here's An Introduction To Etymology: Eight Great Word Origins from Babbel Magazine.

Oh, and watch the video if you want to know why "insect" and "sex" share the same origin ;-)

_{Etymology and surprising origins of words}

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