Salt, by the third definition in an ancient edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, is wit. The stuff in the shaker is not just sodium chloride but also, if you squint, “that which gives life or pungency to discourse or written composition; poignancy of expression; pungent wit.” And if some merry trickster sabotages your soup by unscrewing the top of said shaker, you can take some solace that the metaphor still works:
“Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.”
— William Hazlitt
Maya Angelou compared jealousy in a relationship to salt in the same way: a little adds flavour, a lot will spoil the dish, and a Lot’s wife will kill you. That’s where wit has the advantage; unless you’re sprinkling your clever insults on homicidal targets, death rarely results.
“The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea.”
— Isak Dinesen
Let’s streeetch the metaphor until it snaps. In his recent investigation into the ludicrous amount of salt that restaurants use, Adam Platt relays this advice from his doctor: “Don’t ever eat a potato.” They’re salt sponges! The problem, as explained by nutritionist Marion Nestle, is that “the more of it you eat, the more you prefer, and if you’re already eating a lot of salt, you need more of it to make your food taste better.” Applying that logic to wit, if we’ve OD’d on it, we should be consistently demanding more and more jokes, puns, sight gags, and double entendres of our culture. In reality, we’re still stuck in the era that Saturday Night Live identified back in 2017 as Award-Worthy Comedy, and we’re worse off for it. Ergo, salt and wit have equal but opposite effects on blood pressure. (Why, we’ve had to wait more than 30 years for a Naked Gun sequel, which I’ll finally see on Tuesday so no spoilers please.)
“Wilma, I promise you; whatever scum did this, not one man on this force will rest one minute until he’s behind bars. Now, let's grab a bite to eat.”
— Frank Drebin
I dove into the briny deep on salt in my 2017 book Elements of Taste: Understanding What We Like and Why. Using a rickety framework of my own devising, I grouped all culture into the five basic tastes. Sweet stuff was for the kids, sour was for teens, bitter was high art, umami was dully compelling information, and salty, well, that was the provocative content. The taste of experience, I called it, and noted the silly Freudian theory that our craving for salt is a misdirected sex drive. Coarse, naughty, ribald, angry: salty, and the kind that elevates blood pressure. With a grain or two of NaCl, this second metaphor holds up!
“Being kissed by a man who didn’t wax his moustache was like eating an egg without salt.”
— Rudyard Kipling
The great thing about serving up salt, the thing I remind myself when the words aren’t quite wording, is that no one expects a full meal. Or as Francis Bacon put it in a disclaimer on a book of essays: “My hope is they may be as grains of salt that will rather give you an appetite than offend you with satiety.” If your brain is not yet full, you’re welcome.
“Be not affronted at a joke. If one throw salt at thee, thou wilt receive no harm, unless thou art raw.”
— Oliver Goldsmith
“Society, my dear, is like salt water, good to swim in but hard to swallow.”
— Arthur Stringer
For every seasoning, there is a time — but perhaps not yet for the other four tastes. Let’s take a random detour next week.
Get Wit Quick No. 330 was better than working in the salt mines, for me at least. Salt-N-Pepa insist to this day (not that I asked them) that their 1986 hit Push It is about dancing, not sex. But then Shaw maybe said that dancing is a perpendicular expression of horizontal desire. Salty! This newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Give the ❤️ below a quick shake for flavour’s sake.
All my beloved GWQ VIPs get a smidgen and a half more out of each issue. It’s called Quip Service, a careful selection of extra clever thoughts on the topic of the moment. This week:
Four thoughts to enhance your summer reading
Or to give you solace when you gaze upon all the books you clearly aren’t going to touch
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