This week’s theme
Biblical idioms

This week’s words
Adam and Eve
mess of pottage
salt of the earth

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(SALT uhv thuh UHRTH)

MEANING:

noun: A person or group considered to be among the finest of humanity.

ETYMOLOGY:

From salt, from Old English sealt + earth, from Old English eorthe. Earliest documented use: 1386.

NOTES:

In Matthew 5:13 Jesus gives the Sermon on the Mount and calls good, moral people the salt of the earth. What’s so special about salt? Ask someone who has to dine on food without salt. Or a marathoner running low on electrolytes. Or someone needing to preserve food for a long winter or sea voyage prior to the invention of refrigeration. Roman soldiers got a special allowance for salt. That’s where we got the word salary, from Latin sal (salt). It’s a myth that they were actually paid in salt.

USAGE:

“Jones’s thesis is that British writers, after centuries of patronizing working-class people as ‘the salt of the earth’, now depict them only as hooligans, if they write about them at all.”
Deborah Friedell; Blighty; The New Yorker; Sep 12, 2011.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: