In the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Billy Baker has an article exploring the cultural significance of the local expression salted, a popular put-down among Boston's schoolkids. Baker explains:
Salted is typically delivered by a third party as a way to get into someone else's fight — person one insults person two, and person three informs person one that he or she has just been salted. It's an exclamation point on someone else's insult….
Salted, in this usage, appears to be exclusive to the region, and its demographic reaches from late grammar school into high school. The etymology of salted, however, is the subject of much debate. One camp says it's an abbreviation of insulted, and the word is actually "sulted." Others say it's short for assaulted. The third school, and the one that is most convinced that it's right, says it simply comes from the idea of throwing salt into a wound. But when it is used, and how, is not up for debate; and in this case, the particular word may be new but the role it plays is not. Depending on where you grew up and when, you may have heard other terms perform similar duty: "Burned." "Busted." "Faced." "Dissed." "Sauced."
What comes next should be utterly predictable to Language Log readers.
It's like the way "the Eskimos have all those words for snow," one Boston Latin student said when I asked why we have so many terms for the same thing.
Yes, the popular notion of lexical abundance is alive and well at Boston Latin School, with the hardy snow-classifying Eskimos serving as the inevitable reference point. And it's handy that the student voiced this sentiment, sparing Baker the rhetorical dirty work of bringing in the obligatory snow-word trope.
Baker's overall point in the article isn't really about the local abundance of available put-downs (since, as he acknowledges, such insults are "not exclusive to Boston"), but about the singularly Bostonian pungency of salted:
But salted is better because it's more cruel in that direct, remorseless way that children have. It is not, like its ancestors, meant to be antagonistic. It is final. There is no comeback. You've been salted. It stings.
This at least provides an extra dimension to the usual argument of lexical richness, assessing not just quantity but also quality. For an insult-prone social group like Boston schoolchildren, it's helpful to have lots and lots of cruel put-downs at your disposal, but it's even better to have one especially caustic one. Baker, however, wants salted to say much more about "this city, its people, and our wicked sense of humor." Investing so much revelatory power in one particular word can make for a compelling magazine article, but it's another form of pop-Whorfian reductionism nonetheless.