Frequently in my workplace, when some bad news comes in, the advice take this with a grain of salt is used in such a context to mean choose for yourselves how to interpret this but don't consider it very important. So if you balance the current issue on one side of some scales, and a grain of salt on the either, you get a feeling for how important this issue is in the big picture I've asked several people around the office what they understand this to mean - and each person got to this answer via a different means:Ī grain of salt doesn't weigh very much. Some people add a grain of salt to coffee to reduce the perception of bitterness. In Latin the word for salt is the same as the word for wisdom, meaning that the current issue to be viewed through a lens of your life experience. My question is: Can the phrase "take it with a grain of salt" have four different ways to get to the same meaning? Pliny the Elder recommended that a grain of salt was to be used as an antidote for poison. Your informal survey was an interesting exercise in uncovering the extent to which different individuals may understand the same expression differently. In this case, it seems likely that the reason was that not everyone you surveyed was familiar with Pliny's recommendation (as indeed I was not), so they reached for an alternative explanation that made intuitive sense to them. (Mind you, even I am only assuming that the Pliny reason is the correct one I could be wrong.) For an additional take on the Pliny hypothesis, read what the etymologist Michael Quinion has to say on his website.
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