SALT - Worth or Wound?

 
Today we’re talking about salt. Why? Because I wanted to know why we say someone is worth their salt. Salt may not be doing your blood pressure any favors, but for most of history it was valuable enough to measure a person’s worth—which is impressive for something now sold in a cardboard cylinder next to the pepper. To find out why, we have to go back to the Romans.

Salt—sodium chloride—has long been essential to human life. Before refrigeration and canning, it was one of the main ways to preserve food, so was a valuable commodity. That helps explain the phrase worth one’s salt, meaning worth one’s pay. The exact Roman connection is still debated: some say soldiers were paid in salt, while others say they received money to buy it. Either way, the point is the same—if you did your job well, and were worth the money you were being paid, you were worth your salt. If you didn’t, you were basically the ancient version of a guy getting paid to lean on a shovel.

And then we have those people who are the salt of the earth, meaning they are genuine, trustworthy, and of great worth or reliability. The idea behind it is that salt was small, ordinary, and easy to overlook—but incredibly important. So the phrase suggests that truly good people are often not flashy or powerful; they are the ones who quietly preserve what’s good, add character, and hold communities together.

After nine years in the Navy, I heard salty dog plenty of times. It simply refers to someone with a lot of sea time—an experienced sailor seasoned by years on the water. Or, more briefly, an old salt.

Enough about salty people. If you’re skeptical, take this with a grain of salt—in other words, accept it cautiously, the way you’d listen to a man who begins a sentence with, “Now, I’m no doctor, but …” One theory links the phrase to the ancient belief that salt helped unpleasant things go down more easily, both literally and figuratively. Around 77 A.D., King Mithridates VI of Pontus was said to build immunity to poison by taking small doses mixed with salt. True or not, the phrase came to mean treating doubtful claims with caution—because some ideas deserve belief, and others deserve a raised eyebrow.

And then we have those who like to throw salt in the wound. The term transitioned into a popular English idiom—meaning to deliberately make an already bad or painful situation even worse. You know how it goes: a man loses his job, and before he’s even finished cleaning out his desk, somebody says, “Well, maybe now you’ll finally have time to fix your golf swing.” It’s what happens when life knocks you flat, and someone helpfully leans over to critique your landing. That’s not comfort—that’s throwing salt in the wound.

The phrase "throwing salt in the wound" originated as a literal act of torture and hygiene. Historically, military flogging, such as in the British Navy, broke the skin. Salt was rubbed into the wound to prevent infection, but it caused agonizing pain, becoming a severe secondary punishment.

And finally, there’s the custom of throwing salt over your left shoulder.

For centuries, salt was so precious that spilling it was considered wasteful and unlucky. Some believed it invited misfortune—or even the devil—to meddle in one’s affairs. Throwing a pinch over the left shoulder was thought to ward off bad luck and cancel the curse.