Since 1992
Print and digital marketing
By Barbara McAllister
Word of the Day: Salary
The word we use to describe a fixed amount received from an employer every week or so has its origins in the Latin word for salt, sal and salarius, “pertaining to salt.” This is said to be because ancient Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in salt instead of money. A competent soldier was “worth his salt.” There is some question as to whether that is a myth, but there is no question that in ancient times salt was a valuable commodity. Before refrigeration salt was in great demand as a means to preserve meat and fish. It was so important it was referred to as white gold. The word salad is also from the Latin word sal. Salt was an important ingredient in dressing used by ancient Romans and Greeks who typically used it along with vinegar, oil and other herbs to flavor raw vegetables. Called salata, it literally means “salted with dressing.”
Salt (sodium chloride) is the only family of rocks regularly eaten by humans. The adult human body contains about 250 grams of salt, about half a pound. According to a superstition, spilling salt causes bad luck. This may be because salt was a precious commodity, but it may have originated with Leonardo da Vinci’s painting “The Last Supper,” which shows Judas Iscariot in front of a salt container that had been knocked over.
In Britain, towns with the “wich” suffix came to denote places connected to salt. Towns like Leftwich, Middlewich, Droitwich and Norwich reflect the earliest method of salt production, which was to gather sea salt using flat pans in a shallow bay, called a wick or wich in Norse and Early English. In the U.S., at least 16 states mine salt, but more than 90 percent of it comes from Kansas, Louisiana, New York, Ohio, Texas, Utah and Michigan. There is an enormous salt mine under the city of Detroit more than 1,000 feet below the surface. It’s called the “city beneath the city” and covers more than 1,500 acres a with more than 100 miles of underground roads. Salt mining was the main industry in Detroit long before it was the auto capital of the U.S.
