I have been helping a friend edit a book he has been writing for 20 years about science. Just right up my alley. I learned that the most common mineral on the earth is salt.

Today it is common to have table salt with your meals. It wasn’t always so. Now salt is in such abundance it is believed to always have been readily available—but that wasn’t always the case. Salt was hard to come by and very expensive right up until the 1900’s.

In ancient Greece, traders bartered for slaves with the commodity of salt. An unruly or lazy slave was considered “not worth his salt,” an insult still in use today. You may have heard it about some of your co-workers! But surely not you.

The English word ‘salary’ dates back to Roman times. The salary, or allowance, for Roman soldiers was called in Latin ‘a salarium argentums’. This translates roughly to ‘salt money.’ Money so they could by salt!

In addition, the Latin word for ‘well-being’ was ‘salus’. And the word indicating good health was ‘salubritas’, both of which derive from the Latin word meaning ‘salt’.

So you see, salt was a valuable commodity. Now you can throw it over your shoulder for good luck. And as a matter of good luck, all of our Founding Fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, were worth their salt!