Stupid question but uh…?
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“To “take something with a grain of salt,” of course, means to not entirely believe a story, or to view it with a healthy degree of skepticism. It doesn’t mean that you think the person recounting the story is completely crazy or making it all up. It just means you don’t want to be close enough to get caught under the net his keepers are fixing to drop on him.
It’s actually a translation of the Latin phrase “*** grano
salis.” There seems to be a bit of a debate about the significance of the Latin phrase, however. Etymologist Christine Ammer traces it to Pompey’s discovery, recorded by Pliny in 77 A.D., of an antidote to poison which had to be taken with a small amount of salt to be effective. Everyone else seems to bypass that explanation and trace
“with a grain of salt” to the dinner table, where a dash of salt can often make uninspired cooking more palatable. “With a grain of salt” first appeared in English in 1647, and has been in constant use since
then.”