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Salary -- worth your salt?

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 "not worth your salt" (low value, lazy, dishonest).
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