Well, it seems I got ahead of myself last week, as this Sunday is actually Mothers’ Day! So once again, I wish every mother a super day!

When Barbara George asked me about this old adage at church a couple of weeks ago, I felt sure that I must have done a column on it at some point. After all, it was one of the first 1500 sayings that I researched, and was included in my original volume of Most Comprehensive Origins of Clichés, Proverbs and Figurative Expressions that I published in 2013.

I searched my files all the way back to my first column in the Southern Standard on September 19, 2019, and to my surprise, I haven’t used this one before!

Taking something with a grain of salt means that one should consider the source of some new ‘truth’ before swallowing it ‘hook line and sinker.’

This has been around since the seventeenth century, and comes from the fact that food is more easily swallowed if taken with a small amount of salt. Pliny the Elder (actually Gaius Plinius Secundus, 23 AD to 25 August 79 AD) translated an ancient antidote for poison with the words ‘to be taken fasting, plus a grain of salt.’

Now we know how long ago this came into being! It is a wise old saying!