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Salt, silt, sausage and salad
The term ‘salt’ is a mundane looking little word that has a fascinating history. It derives from the Indo-European root *sal- and is at the basis of the word for salt in all the major Indo-European languages — think of German ‘Salz’, Dutch ‘zout’, French ‘sel’, Italian ‘sale’ and of course English ‘salt’. But the roots of salt have also spread into an extraordinary array of linguistic contexts — words as different as ‘silt, salary, salad, sauce, saucer, sausage’, and the verb ‘to souse’; these all contain the linguistic element “salt”, although of course very little any more of the actual sense of “salt”.
‘Silt’ requires just a simple change of vowel — salt to silt. It would have originally denoted a salty deposit, but has since generalised to any kind of earthy sediment carried by moving water. The word ‘salary’ shows better the importance of salt. It derives from a Latin term for “salt rations” — a salary was originally an allowance given to soldiers to pay for salt. Now, in the case of ‘salad’, the root sense of salt comes about on account of the all-important dressing; it was originally very, very salty. According to foodie and lexicographer John Ayto, the Romans were great salad-eaters; their salads weren’t all that different from ours today — a mixture of raw vegetables, like lettuce, endive and cucumber, and always with some sort of dressing of oil, vinegar or often brine. In Vulgar Latin the name for this dish was actually ‘herba salata’, literally ”salted herb” from which then comes our term salad. The beloved ‘sausage’ also goes back to Latin ‘salsus’ or “salted”. The Romans would stuff pounded meat, spices and herbs into the skin of animal intestine to form linked cylindrical rolls. It was a convenient way of keeping meat, and this preserving aspect is preserved in its name: sausage. The word ‘sauce’ has exactly the same root: Latin salsus “salted”. It originally referred to any kind of appetising condiment that accompanied food. The ‘saucer’ shares the root also. It was the receptacle on the table used for holding the sauces or indeed even the salt. Apply another simple change of vowel and you get to the verb ‘to souse’ Sousing originally referred to the preparation and preservation of meat or fish by soaking it in some kind of pickle made from vinegar or brine. Of course nowadays it’s generalised to mean simply “to plunge into water or any kind of liquid” — although probably in Australian English it is usually used more colloquially for drinking to intoxication. Someone’s who is soused is after all pickled, canned, bottled or at least well-marinated.
Noise and nauseous
Meaning shifts really do provide lovely windows into culture, artefacts and attitudes of the past. The etymological links between the words ‘noise’ and ‘nauseous’ offer a good example. The ordinary English word noise actually goes back to an earlier expression with the meaning “sea-sickness”. It comes to us from the Latin word nausea “sea-sickness” (from the synonymous Greek word meaning literally “ship-sickness” (you can see here the word naux “ship”, which of course has given us words like nautical). But how do you get from the meaning “sea-sickness” to the current meaning of noise “intrusive sound”? These days we don’t tend to think of the sound of sea-sickness, but as wordsmith Eric Partridge once pointed out it once must have been incredible. Here you have to imagine the unfortunate sailors in a tiny wooden vessel caught in the middle of a storm in the times of Ancient Greece — picture the din (the creaking of the ship, the wind howling, the waves battering the sides and of course the groans and moans of those on board!). The racket and commotion would have been considerable. Imagine this and the shift from “sea-sickness” to “din, confusion” to “intrusive sound” suddenly seems quite reasonable!