WordFixx

Considering how many people bring home a salary, it's funny how the origin of the word has gotten lost. Salary is from the Latin salarium , which was the allowance given to Roman soldiers for buying salt. Salt was a large part of the economy for many early civilizations. Salt was needed for preserving meats, and played a role in history right up to the time of Gandhi. Of course, there is plenty of debate over exactly what form of salt payment was involved. Some say there were direct payments made in salt, either in containers or rock-hard ingots or disks; others stick with the allowance idea; others that it was simply the right to purchase a certain amount of salt from royal storehouses. It may have been tried different ways in different centuries. However it was done, there has salt in our salary ever since. From the early salt trade comes two opposite expressions of the value of human life: a person can be "the salt of the earth" (high value, righteous, honest) or...

Sorry, but I can't resist this one. After the last entry about brand names turning into nouns and verbs, this one popped into my head. We've all heard of toilets being called "crappers." But there's an odd legend that the toilet was actually invented by a guy named Thomas Crapper. Apparently, this was a real man, who was a well-known plumber and sanitation engineer with some patents -- his company name did appear on many toilet tanks, and supposedly the World War I soldiers came to call the whole toilet a crapper as a result. This site has the best dicussion of it: LINK However, "crap" has a long history or being applied to crappy things, from weeds to chaff to the dregs of beer. In various forms, it has been with us since the 15th century. And Mr. Crapper's name probably came from Cropper, a respectable trade. So, this is another brand name gone native, and a caution about letting related words lead us astray. The odds that we would crap in a...