What's the saying?

Question

How does the term go, is it: "with a grain of salt" or "worth a grain of salt. And what is the original meaning of this metaphor?

Answer 1

With a pinch of salt , it meens you cant really believe all of it

Answer 2

Take it with a pinch of salt.

Answer 3

Take with a grain of salt.

Meaning

To take a statement with 'a grain of salt' or 'a pinch of salt' means to accept it but to maintain a degree of skepticism about its truth.

Origin

The idea comes from the fact that food is more easily swallowed if taken with a small amount of salt. Pliny the Elder translated an ancient antidote for poison with the words 'be taken fasting, plus a grain of salt'.

Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, 77 A.D. translates thus:

After the defeat of that mighty monarch, Mithridates, Gnaeus Pompeius found in his private cabinet a recipe for an antidote in his own handwriting; it was to the following effect: Take two dried walnuts, two figs, and twenty leaves of rue; pound them all together, with the addition of a grain of salt; if a person takes this mixture fasting, he will be proof against all poisons for that day.

The suggestion is that injurious effects can be moderated by the taking of a grain of salt.

The figurative meaning, i.e. that truth may require moderation by the notional application of 'a grain of salt', didn't enter the language until much later, no doubt influenced by classical scholars' study of Ancient Greek texts like the works of Pliny. The phrase has been in use in English since the 17th century. For example, John Trapp's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments, 1647:

"This is to be taken with a grain of salt."

The 'pinch of salt' variant is more recent. The earliest printed citation that I can find for it is F. R. Cowell's Cicero & the Roman Republic, 1948:

"A more critical spirit slowly developed, so that Cicero and his friends took more than the proverbial pinch of salt before swallowing everything written by these earlier authors."

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/take-...

Answer 4

(With) a grain of salt is a literal translation of a Latin phrase, (***) grano salis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_of_sa...

Answer 5

take it with a grain of salt.

Means dont believe it word for word. part might be true but part is opinion.

Answer 6

wikipedia had a discussion about the phrase "with a grain of salt from which i found this: "What I learned in Latin classes is that the phrase "c-u-m grano salis" (lol, yahoo answer would not allow the first 3 letters to appear together, assuming i was talking dirty to you, so i added dashes, hilarious! its latin for with) refers to the practice of paying Roman soldiers in salt; thus, a grain (or a pinch) of salt equivalently means "worthless" and is the rise of other phrases such as "Not worth his salt". The Latin word salt, salus, is from where English derives the word 'salary'. So taking something 'with a grain of salt' essentially means to take something but to afford it little value."

however dictionary.com had a most interesting story that i will show you here that gives its origin specifically to Pliny the Elder, a Roman author in 77 A.D :

Firstly, with a grain of salt means 'with reservations; skeptically'. Though the saying's origin is ultimately unknown, it implies that a pinch of salt can often make food more palatable or easier to swallow. There is also a story that Pliny the Elder wrote about Pompey's seizing of the palace of Mithridates (in Pliny's Historia Naturalis). Pompey found the king's fabled secret antidote against poisons that had protected the king against assassins. This antidote had 72 ingredients and the last line of the formula read "to be taken fasting, plus a grain of salt (Latin *** grano salis)." Pliny's remark supposedly begat the use of this saying, which came to mean 'to accept something with reservations, to avoid swallowing something whole'.

Wikipedia also recounts an alternative story of its origin: "An alternative account says that the Roman general believed he could make himself immune to poison by ingesting small amounts of various poisons, and he took this treatment with a grain of salt to help him swallow the poison. In this version, the salt is not the antidote, it was taken merely to assist in swallowing the poison, but later Roman readers found the story (or the effectiveness of the antidote) hard to swallow!"

Also a similar explanation was proffered by the Word-detective.com, ending his explanation with this piece of humor, "'With a grain of salt' first appeared in English in 1647, and has been in constant use since then. The amount of salt metaphorically needed to make an unlikely statement acceptable often varies from a few grains to a few pounds. With all the flapdoodle being thrust at us these days, I'm surprised there isn't a national salt shortage."

Answer 7

I know the one that goes..."Take it with a pinch of salt" ...meaning not to take something too seriously. ....the other one is how you quoted it..."Not worth a grain of salt".....the sayings come from the times when salt was a very expensive commodity and was treated as currency.....

Answer 8

you take something with a pinch of salt - it means not to believe it completely