A dish of sea salt
26 August 2021
To take something with a grain of salt means to not accept a statement at face value, to question its veracity or accuracy. This is an example of a dead metaphor. The idiom is oft used, but few, if any, understand what salt has to do with trusting a statement.
The English phrase is a translation of the Latin cum grano salis. And that phrase may have been inspired by a passage in Pliny the Elder’s (c.23–79 C.E.) Natural History. In writing about walnuts, Pliny records this anecdote (or antidote):
In sanctuariis Mithridatis maximi regis devicti Cn. Pompeius invenit in peculiari commentario ipsius manu conpositionem antidoti e duabus nucibus siccis, item ficis totidem et rutae foliis xx simul tritis, addito salis grano; ei quo hoc ieiunus sumat nullum venenum nociturum illo die.
(After the mighty king Mithridates had been defeated, Gnaeus Pompey found in a personal notebook in his private archive a prescription for an antidote written in the king’s own hand: two dried walnuts, two figs, and twenty leaves of rue were ground together. When one will have added a grain of salt, he who would take this while fasting would not be harmed by poison for that day.)
First, note that Pliny does not write cum grano salis, but rather uses the verb addere, to add. Second, Pliny’s passage is ambiguous. The grain of salt could be an essential element in the antidote. Or it could be an addition to make the mixture easier to swallow. Or there is a third possibility. The Latin word sal generally meant salt, but it could also mean common sense, wit, or sarcasm. Pliny may have meant the idea that this antidote would work was ludicrous and not to be believed.
In any case, the anecdote about Mithridates became quite well known, and Pliny’s version could very well be the inspiration for the English phrase. If not, the second sense of sal meaning common sense explains the metaphor without resorting to this particular story.
In English writing, we see the Latin cum grano salis being used in the metaphorical sense of doubt in Thomas Morton’s 1609 A Catholike Appeale for Protestants, a critique of Roman Catholic theology:
The testimonie of their imagined Cyprian, which proueth no more that the bread is changed into flesh, then it proueth that (for it is the same Authors comparison) Christs humanitie is changed into his Diuinitie: which without heresie, cannot be directly affirmed.
If they shall still persist in the seeming shews of words, then must they be admonished to construe the meaning of these words of that Cyprian; This consecrated bread (saith he) giueth life & increase vnto our bodies. Which kind of speech, euen in the iudgement of their owne Cardinall, cannot be literally vnderstood without absurditie; and therefore may instruct our Apologists to reade such like sacramentall phrases of ancient Fathers, at least, cum grano salis, with a graine of reasonable salt of better discretion, then hitherto they haue done.
Morton adds a “reasonable” to the phrase, indicating that the idiom was not yet well established in English, and would help to explain the second meaning of the Latin sal to those unfamiliar with it.
Several decades later we see the Latin paired with its English translation in Richard Carpenter’s 1641 Experience, Historie, and Divinitie:
The terms of Divinitie are to be taken into the mouth, as the Canonists speak, cum grano salis, with a grain of salt, that is, wisely tasted, and understood: otherwise, they will not prove good nourishment.
And we see the English phrase standing on its own, no Latin present, in John Trapp’s 1647 commentary on the biblical book of Revelation:
We doubt not (saith a learned Interpreter here) but that the crowned Saints do in generall know the afflicted condition of the Church militant, and do wish them deliverance: but our speciall necessities and occurrences of particular persons they cannot know. Brother Bradford (said Bishop Ridley, a little afore he was offered up) so long as I shall understand thou art in thy journey, by Gods grace I shall call upon our heavenly Father to set thee safely home: and then, good brother, speak you for the remnant that are to suffer for Christs sake, according to that thou then shalt know more clearly. But this is to be taken with a grain of salt.
In the end, the origin of this phrase is in this second sense of the Latin sal meaning common sense. It could be inspired by Pliny, who was using a similar wording in a literal sense, but we can’t say that with any degree of certainty.
Sources:
Carpenter, Richard. Experience, Historie, and Divinitie. London: I.N. for John Stafford, 1641, 167. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, 1879, s. v. sal. Brepolis: Database of Latin Dictionaries.
Morton, Thomas. A Catholike Appeale for Protestants. London: Richard Field impensis George Field and John Norton, 1609, 100. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. salt, n.1.
Pliny the Elder. Natural History, Volume VI: Books 20–23. W.H.S. Jones, trans. Loeb Classical Library 392. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1951, 23:77, 514.
Trapp, John. A Commentary or Exposition Upon All the Epistles, and the Revelation of John the Divine. London: A.M. for John Bellamy, 1647, 516. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Picture credit: National Institute of Korean Language, 2016. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Korea license.