"Take It With a Grain of Salt"
Have you ever heard the saying "take it with a grain of salt"? You probably have heard it so many times that it is "old", that is because this saying is a cliché. A cliché is an overused term.
The saying "take it with a grain of salt" probably came about in 100AD. This is because this saying is of a Latin root, "cum grano salis". When it was used in Latin it was meant for directions to take medicine or to suggest the truth in a story. Some do suggest that the saying came around in 1647AD as the English version though (www.businessballs.com, n/p).
The literal meaning, when the saying was new, was to eat a small amount of salt with the medicine prescribed. The literal meaning now, is to have some salt on your food for improvement in flavor (www.businessballs.com,
An image of a grain of table salt taken using a sc...
And Take It with a Grain of Salt
English: Entrance, Scotts House, Omagh This was th...n/p). Though these two meanings are what you would find in the dictionary the cliché definition of this cliché is very different. The cliché definition is to understand that something being said is not to be taken seriously. Today you would only hear this if someone is telling a story with some falseness in it (www.clichesite.com, n/p).
This cliché can only be taken in a bad way. When you are talking to someone and another person tells them, "take whatever she says with a grain of salt", you would be hurt because they would be telling this person to not believe you. When you really think of the definition in this situation you can only make nonsense of it. In the tense that it is used now the denotative meaning does not make sense. No one tells people to take their food with a grain of salt anymore (www.businessballs.com,