• salary •
Pronunciation: sal-êr-ri • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: Money paid for work.
Notes: Today's Good Word is a semantic oddity in that it is related to salad, salsa, sauce, and salt (see Word History). The adjective, salaried, looks like a past participle of a verb, but it is marked by the adjective suffix -ed "having", as in forested, bearded, one-eyed. We do have a noun, salariat "salary-owners collectively, the salaried class".
In Play: Michelle Pfeiffer was once quoted as saying: "I act for free, but I demand a huge salary as compensation for all the annoyance of being a public personality." It is a common word that pops up everywhere: "The Church pays their priests' salaries, so they don't want anyone rocking the boat with unorthodox rumors."
Word History: Hidden behind today's ordinary, seemingly simple Good Word lies a fantastic history. It was taken from Old French salaire "wages, pay", from Latin salarium "allowance, stipend, pension", presumed originally to refer to the "salt allowance" (salary) paid to a Roman soldier. This word is the neuter singular of salarius "pertaining to salt", based on sal "salt". Latin inherited this word from PIE sal- "salt, salty water, sea", which underlies Sanskrit salila- "sea", Greek hals "salt, sea", Irish salann "salt", Welsh halen "salt", Breton holen "salt", Russian sol "salt", Polish sól "salt", Czech sůl "salt", German Salz "salt", English, Danish, and Norwegian salt, and Latvian sāls "salt". The same PIE word emerged in Lithuanian as saldus "sweet"! This semantic switch may have been Balto-Slavic, since Russian sladkii "sweet", Polish słodki "sweet", and Serbian sladak "sweet" seem based on the same PIE root metathesized. (Now let's give Monika Freund, an unsalaried contributor since 2010, a round of e-applause for today's historically fantastic Good Word.)
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