A Grain of Fault

An e-mail today made me step back for a few minutes to shake my head over how easily the truth can be magnified and distorted until it barely resembles it’s purer self. Like the proverbial leaven, a little bit of it can flavor a story and cause it to rise and grow in odd and unexpected directions.

And we’re so used to this, we do it — as tellers and listeners — without thinking about it, without batting an eye. We accept so easily what we’re told, without weighing it against everything else we know to be true . . . not even weighing it even against just a grain of salt.

It was this reflection that sent me in search of the origin of that phrase. I assumed that it came from the purifying nature of salt, how anything you heard needed some intellectual seasoning in order to remove whatever defilement it might have picked up along the way. However, Wikipedia set me straight:

A grain of salt is a literal translation of an ancient Latin phrase, cum grano salis.

“Salt”, in Roman times, was what was called the brains within the human head, or perhaps was what they believed filled the human head. The Latin expression was thus a proverb of sorts–meaning that, in everything, we should use at least a grain of intelligence or understanding. It was, then, a recall to common sense–a reminder of prudence and reflection before action.

I like that almost as much, the idea that our thoughts are granular and, I assume, scarcer and more valuable than we give them credit for — much like salt’s scarcity in the classical world.

Who said this, who said that, why something happened, who’s to blame for it all . . . we nod and absorb what we’re told at face value. Our desire to be told something, anything, as explanation so often outweighs our basic understanding that, yes, every story told is only a flattened facet of a larger and more complex structure. To belabor the metaphor, truth is crystalline. And, of course, so is salt.

There’s lots of it these days, salt. It’s as common as anything. It’s on everyone’s table, it’s in all our food, it lingers on our lips and at the corners our mouths.

But the truth, the unsalted truth, remains as scarce as it was back then.

And so I shake my head, feel my thoughts shift and drift inside, remind myself of the truth, and check my e-mail once again…