Drawyer wrote:
(Wow, thanks!)
Take with a grain of salt
This means not to take what someone says too seriously.
That's a good one.
In ancient Rome, where the court intrigue got intense, and you had to worry about being poisoned, there was a belief that a pinch of salt on food would detoxify poison (NOT true).
Two thousand years later the thinkers of the 1700's Enlightenment, including America's Founding Fathers, were all students of ancient Greece and Rome. And they revived the expression as a metaphor:in a letter someone like Thomas Jefferson would say "Take what so-and-so says with a grain of salt"( ie dont take it as credible/true).