where does the saying"take it with a pinch of salt"come from.?
828161
Salt is a seasoning that makes bitter things taste better. So to take something with a pinch of salt means to ignore the bitterness of that something
748404
On the rim of a £2 coin, it's a quote from Isaac Newton.\n\n (He's saying that he couldn't have got to be the great scientist that he was without having the work of other scientists before him to work with) \n\nWikipedia will tell you that it has been "mistakenly" attributed to Isaac Newton - but although it has been used by other people before him - the quote is most famous for Newton's use.
1145293
I've heard it used to refer to someone sitting and allowing something to "sink in."  For example, if I'd just given someone some news that they didn't want to hear, I'd let them have some time to sit and marinate for awhile before pursuing the issue.
910600
The phrase is "mind your p's and q's."  It means to be careful and pay attention to detail.  It comes from the old days when we used printing presses and the p's and q's looked similar and would often times get mixed up.
819564
ingredients are  pinche of salt and warm water. u add salt to the warm water and stir .
415730
Salt used to be a very valuable commodity, therefore something that was valuable was 'worth its salt' in mcuh the same way as something is 'worth its weight in gold'. Also at various times in history salt has been used to pay wages, therefore something that is done well is 'worth its salt'.
44504
there are two supposed origins - \n1. is from the word nut, meaning hard seed, which is called "hnutu" in Old English or "*khnut" in Proto-Germanic\n\n2. from earlier be nutts upon "be very fond of" (1785), which is possibly from nuts (noun, plural) "any source of pleasure" (1617), from nut (described above). Sense influenced probably by metaphoric application of nut to "head" (1846, e.g. to be off one's nut "be insane," 1860). Nut "crazy person, crank" is attested from 1903, (British form nutter first attested 1958).
1060321
Salt is considered white gold; something valuable and important\nSalt is necessary for survival.\nJesus reminded his deciples that they should be precious to the world, as salt is to life, and not to lose their saltiness as when diluted in water.\n\nLots wife turned to a "pillar of salt": This idiom is used to make a strong statement for the lesson to be learned. A pillar of salt will be remembered better than a pillar of stone. An emphasis is put on the moral of the story by referring to it as salt.\nIn real, she might have gotten burned to charcoal or her salty body fluids may have oozed out of the skin. Since such literal descriptions are usually not used in the Bible, the happening was depicted as a pillar of salt.
232764
It's believed that this saying was created by an English humorist in the 1800s. Most people have difficulty saying anything with their tongue in their cheek. But some people actually do stick their tongue against the inside of their cheek after saying a joke to show that they're only kidding.
919754
The saying comes from the Book of Common Prayer used in many Anglican churches.  It actually referrers to the passage in the Christian bible in Genesis 3:19: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou [art], and unto dust shalt thou return.\n\nIt refers to the mortality of man and the fact that our body will decay and return to the earth we were formed from.
730419
Probably 2.\n\nMIND YOUR PS AND QS\n\nA puzzling and quirky idiom\n\nThere has recently been a discussion on the Usenet newsgroup alt.usage.english about this somewhat outdated saying. As so often happens, a series of posters have recounted the explanations they’ve heard about its origins without really advancing the discussion. It would be difficult to reach a conclusion in any case, as the facts to base it on have been lost. All we can do is theorise, which can be fun, but it does tend to generate more heat than light. Here, for what its worth, are the facts so far as I know them.\n\nIts meaning in recent times—and the one I learned as a child in west London nearly 50 years ago—has been “to mind one’s manners”, “to behave properly”. This is a weakened sense to the one it had in the nineteenth century, when it meant, according to Eric Partridge in A Dictionary of Historical Slang: “to be careful, exact, or prudent in behaviour”.\n\nThese are some of the explanations I’ve seen advanced in various places:\n\n    * Advice to a child learning its letters to be careful not to mix up the handwritten lower-case letters p and q.\n    * Similar advice to a printer’s apprentice, for whom the backward-facing metal type letters would be especially confusing.\n    * Jocular, or perhaps deadly serious, advice to a barman not to confuse the letters p and q on the tally slate, on which the letters stood for the pints and quarts consumed “on tick” by the patrons.\n    * An abbreviation of mind your please’s and thank-you’s.\n    * Instructions from a French dancing master to be sure to perform the dance figures pieds and queues accurately.\n    * An admonishment to seamen not to soil their navy pea-jackets with their tarred queues, that is, their pigtails.\n\nIt is possible to put forward objections to all of these. Why should p and q be singled out for attention in handwriting, when similar problems occur with b and d? This comment might be thought to apply with even greater force to the poor printer’s apprentice. The pints and quarts explanation sounds reasonable, provided that men in bars used to drink beer by the quart, as in fact they did. The French dancing-master explanation sounds just too far-fetched to be credible, as does the one about the seamen. The mind your please’s and thank-you’s seems just as unlikely as the others, but is seriously advanced by some dictionaries, the current edition of the Collins English Dictionary among them.\n\nThere are two similar usages recorded:\n\n    * There was once an expression P and Q, often written pee and kew, which was a seventeenth-century colloquial expression for “prime quality”. This later became a dialect expression (the English Dialect Dictionary reports it in Victorian times from Shropshire and Herefordshire). OED2 has a citation from Rowlands’ Knave of Harts of 1612:\n    * “Bring in a quart of Maligo, right true: And looke, you Rogue, that it be Pee and Kew.” Nobody is really sure what either P or Q stood for. To say they’re the initials of “Prime Quality” seems to be folk etymology, because surely that would make “PQ” rather than “P and Q”. Partridge says that the phrase learn your Ps and Qs, was common about 1820, again being advice to children who may be confused about the two letters.\n\nYou may feel the first of these tends to confuse the issue rather than illuminate it, and you may be right. It may just be coincidence. However, the second does tend to support the idea that it relates to children learning their alphabets. If I had to make a choice, I’d plump for the alphabet-learning origin.\n\nWhat we do know is that mind your Ps and Qs was first recorded in 1779 but that it is slowly dying out. To lose it would be a pity, as it is a link to the past and makes a good subject for some quiet speculation and ingenious attempts at explanation. In common with so many words and phrases in English, its origins must remain
785422
It's probably from Aesop's Fables. That's where most quotes like that come from.
679538
Check this out:\n\nhttp://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/7/messages/381.html
1170816
This originated in the early 1980s. It is generally regarded as an American expression. This item from the New York newspaper the Syracuse Herald-American, Feb. 1982, which is the earliest version in print that I can find, puts that in some doubt. It's in a piece by Jerry Buck, writing out of Los Angeles, about actress Lauren Tewes
280918
I absolutely love that quote! I knew exactly where it was from. \n\nSeems like it. I take the Bible and all of that with a large helping of salt, and create my own set of beliefs. And, lol, the bit about the 10 commandments, I couldn't believe it when I saw GC voice my thoughts so eloquently on tv!
1122664
It is said in the bible....as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he"....and it is also written that out of the abundance of the heart...the mouth will speak...how's that for something to chew on? God always imparts his wisdom to us thru his word, the Bible and thru our prayer time w/ Him...but, you're on the right track!
79395
actually this question was AOL's home page the other day I believe. The saying came from the horse racing track. People would offer a tip and a horse that would win and if was an insider ( jockey, trainer, ect)  or reliable tip they would say it came "straight from the horses mouth"