The word salt was left to us by the Latins (“salt, salis”), who used it both to designate the material product extracted by evaporation from sea water, and to allude, in a figurative sense, to the vivacity, the caustic fineness , to the spicy spirit, to good taste, to intelligence. And so it was, with these two meanings, that salt entered our everyday language, from the least to the most erudite.
Salad, in the feminine it is a vegetable dish in which salt enters, but in the masculine, salad means salty, in the same way that salon is salty, salty or saline ground. Salary, as we have already said, was a ration of salt and today is the meaning of remuneration.
Salé is salted meat and salt shaker is both the container where the salt is stored, with which we sprinkle or sprinkle the food on the plate, as it is the man who sells salt or the one who produces it, ie the salt maker or marnoto. But saleira is Vouga's flat-bottomed boat, which transports the product of their work. Salting is the act of salting, which our parents used to do to bacon and other meats, after the pig had been slaughtered, and to the sardines they placed in barrels to supply the populations of the interior.
Snacks, we eat them as aperitifs or they make a frugal lunch for many, and savory or salmonada is the lack of tidying, it's confusion. Salty are the lowlands, marshes invaded by waters whose salinity or saltiness makes them salty, and it is in these lowlands that, preferentially, saliculture or saliculture is installed. Salicaceae are the plants of a botanical family, salicornia is the common name of one of them and salinometer is the device that measures the salt content.
Salicle or salt mare is the land that produces salt. Brine is water that is more or less saturated with salt, like the one used in tuna and brine, the bowl. It is also the salt water that runs along the Matacães pipeline to Póvoa de Santa Iria, and salmurdo is synonymous with sly or cunning. Brackish or saltwater is said to be water that is more or less contaminated with salt. Parsley, as an adjective, is the same as salty; as a noun it is the herb we use as a seasoning in many culinary confections, but it is also synonymous with sauce. Finally, sausage and salpicão are names for sausages seasoned with salt.
This did not happen with “halos”, the Greek word synonymous with salt. The passage of this people through the peninsula, long before that of the Romans, had neither the duration nor the importance of the Roman occupation. Only in scientific and technological jargon do we have words built on this other etym. It is said that a soil is halomorphic when salty, that an organism is halophilic when it supports the presence of salt well, and plants in this group are called halophytes. It is called halite to rock salt, halides to salt minerals and halokinesis to tectonic deformation induced by the presence of salt rocks within the affected sequences. Hyperhaline, hypohaline, thermohaline, eurihaline, stenohaline, etc., are some more of these terms, used in these cases in oceanography.
For chemists, salt is a compound resulting from the interaction of an acid with a base, such as hydrochloric acid with caustic soda:
HCl+Na(OH)→NaCl+H2O
or the action of an acid on a metal, exemplified by the reaction of the same acid on tin:
2HCl+Sn→SnCl2+H2↑
Chlorides, sulfates, bromides, iodides, carbonates, phosphates, etc. are salts. However, they all need a qualifier that distinguishes them from the rest:
Bitter salt or Epson salt - magnesium chloride
Bertholet salt - potassium chlorate
Fischer's salt - potassium cobaltonitrite
Glasser's salt - potassium sulfate
Glauber's salt - sodium sulfate
Salt de la Hiquerra - magnesium sulfate
Salt de la Rochelle - potassium sodium tartrate
Vichy salt – sodium bicarbonate.
Only sodium chloride dispenses this care. The word salt, said or written alone, is enough.
Author AM Galopim de Carvalho
Science in the regional press – Ciência Viva
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