Take it With a Grain of Salt

I'm awful at keeping schedules.  Ahem:

Perhaps you've heard the phrase, "to take something with a grain of salt."  Perhaps you haven't.  If the latter is the case, then I assure you that it is a fairly common and certainly standard phrase.  It is a staple in phrase books no doubt.

 A grain of salt.  Actual size.

It means, essentially, to view something with skepticism or to not take something too seriously.  For example: "The empiricist took the psychic's prediction with a grain of salt."

The idiom is derived from the Latin phrase, cum grano salis, which you can conveniently substitute for "with a grain of salt" the next time you use the phrase and want to sound like a learned scholar.  So with the previous example: "The empiricist took the psychic's prediction cum grano salis...  B****es."

In modern day Italy, the phrase still exists in the form, "avere sale in zucca," which translates roughly as, "to have salt in your pumpkin."  Here, "pumpkin" is a metonym for "head," and the salt represents wit or intelligence (how fitting!).  Similar phrases also exist in the Dutch (een korreltje zout) and Danish (et gran salt) languages.

The origin of the idiom can be attributed to this fellow,

whom we no doubt all recognize as Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD).  His Naturalis Historia discusses the discovery of an antidote to poison, with one of the ingredients being a grain of salt.  Thus, the poison itself could be taken less seriously.  Alternately, the phrase is attributed to the Roman general Pompey, who, in an effort to build immunities against a variety of poisons, ingested poisons with a grain of salt to make them easier to swallow.

Of course the Latin word salis happens to mean both "salt" and "wit," so maybe there was a mix-up sometime during the last 2,000 years.

The more recent phrase "to take something with a pinch of salt," dates back to 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."

While I usually prefer things in their original, unaltered states, I certainly approve of this variation for reasons that you can probably guess (hint: it has to do with how much salt we're dealing with).

Reader Challenge!

Busy, busy, busy.  Instead of doing the next chemistry post, I'm going to embrace my laziness and instead do a...

READER CHALLENGE!

Okay.  It's not that exciting.  It may not even be challenging.  It's certainly not strenuous.  But the point is that it's supposed to distract you, my beloved readers, from my lack of effort today.  Please ignore the previous sentence. 

So here it is, something to flex your brain over: a philosophical feat too lofty for Voltaire, too enigmatic for Descartes, too circular for Socrates.  You could probably encounter it as a warm-up exercise in a creative writing class:

"Describe the flavor of salt."

That's it.  Go.  Assume you're describing salt to someone who's never tasted it before (heathens), so that you can't just say, "It tastes salty" (Mmmm, how succinct)...

Perhaps at some point, if I'm feeling particularly cerebral, I'll revisit the topic from a philosophical perspective.  "What are the consequences of asking such a question?  Do we acknowledge the limitations of language as a communicative form?"  OH, THE SUPERCILIOUSNESS.

Begin!

Ionic Compounds

Let's take a moment to talk about ionic compounds, as I think this might come in handy for future posts.  I'm admittedly not the best person to talk about chemistry concepts, but I'll do my best not to say something completely untrue.  Here goes:

Ionic compounds are chemical compounds usually consisting of positively charged cations bonded with negatively charged anions or polyatomic ions.  The key here is the ionic bond -- a pretty standard bond to wrap one's head around, since it functions on the attraction of positive charges to negative charges.  Something like magnets, I guess.

(Crap.  Now I need to define cations, anions, and polyatomic ions...)  So they're all ions, if you've noticed, which means they have an unequal balance of protons and electrons, the positive and negative components of atoms, respectively.  Cations are positively charged atoms, anions are negatively charged atoms, and polyatomic ions are molecules (I have to use this term loosely) of an unbalanced charge (very often negative).  Molecules are just groups of atoms, like or unlike, and they are supposed to have a neutral charge.  Polyatomic ions consist of specifically unlike atoms, and of course they're not neutral.

Okay.  The part I really want to get to is the other name that ionic compounds go by...

SALTS.

Sodium chloride is an ionic compound, and apparently it's everybody's favorite, because now all ionic compounds are sporting its name.  It's certainly the most delicious.

Here are some other ionic compounds that we ingest:

• Sodium Flouride: found in toothpaste (which you shouldn't eat) and tablets to prevent cavities.
• Ammonium Chloride: used in cough medicine; as a food additive; and in something called "Salty Licorice" (which doesn't contain table salt, but Ammonium Chloride is a salt).
• Potassium Iodide: used to supplement table salt with iodine, to help prevent iodine deficiency.
• Calcium Chloride: used as a food additive and firming agent.

I'm sure the list goes on.  That was only four, obviously.

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Anyway, this is all supposed to be a briefing for some future subjects I'd like to discuss.  My definitions were all a bit rudimentary, and no doubt muddled (I doodled my way through chem class), so you might consider taking a trip to Wikipedia.  Like this page, for example.