The word “salary” comes from salt.
Roman soldiers were partially compensated in salt, or given an allowance specifically to purchase it. The Latin salarium — from sal, salt — passed through centuries of usage and arrived intact in modern English as the word we use for the money deposited into our accounts every fortnight.
At the time, this made perfect sense.
Salt was scarce. Preserving. Essential. Wars were fought over it. Cities grew around it. Trade routes existed because of it.
It is now a health warning on the side of a soup tin.
The thing we built our entire compensation vocabulary around became so abundant it became a problem. We kept the word. We discarded the scarcity. We now actively manage our intake of the object our language still treats as foundational.
This is worth a moment.
Every generation inherits vocabulary built around the scarcities and urgencies of previous ones. We use the words without examining what they assumed when they were made. Language is, among other things, a fossil record of what people once could not live without.
Salt. Salary. Worth. Currency. Capital. Stock.
The interesting question is not whether Romans overvalued salt.
The interesting question is what we currently treat as so obviously valuable that we are unconsciously building our own metaphors, institutions and vocabulary around it.
Data, perhaps.
Attention.
Bandwidth.
Privacy.
Authenticity.
Time.
Human presence itself.
It is perhaps worth occasionally asking which of our current certainties future generations will quietly add to that list.
Anyway.
Pass the salt.