10 German expressions with salt

"Salt and bread turn your cheeks rosy." This expression implies that basic, hearty food keeps you healthy. But be aware that some versions of the same proverb switch the word "salt" to "dry" bread or even "beer," so it's not exactly the most reliable nutrition guide.

Literally, to "oversalt someone's soup": It means to ruin something someone has made or planned. In English, we'd say "to put a spoke in someone's wheel." Another related German-language expression is "to spit in someone's soup." So if you have enemies, it might be safer not to leave your stew unattended...

"The food is too salty; you must be in love." Apparently, this proverb could prove true: An independent study a few years back by a Bremerhaven research institute showed that people who had recently fallen in love did not taste salt as intensively as single people or those in long-term relationships. Initial research revealed that increased hormone levels heightened the salt taste threshold.

This expression could make the more modest blush. Referring to the fact that goats need salt to help maintain their appetite and body weight, it literally translates as "old goats also like to lick salt" — and implies that older people still have sexual needs, too.

Literally, "I have a ham in his salts," it essentially means there's something still stewing, something still to deliver or take care of, or perhaps you still need to repay someone something.

While the German expression says "to shake salt in a wound," the English version is obviously "to rub salt in the wound," meaning to make an unpleasant situation even worse. In German, you don't even need to rub it in to make it hurt...

While we say "love is the spice of life" in English, this German expression says "friendship is the salt of life." Whether love or friendship, certainly both are essential! It's just getting the right mixture (or flavor) that's sometimes tricky.

The idiom comes from a line in Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea": "Ere you share a bushel of salt with a new-found acquaintance, do not trust him too readily." Only time can tell if this person will become a true friend, the poem adds. With how many people have you shared an entire sack of salt? That's more than walking a mile in someone else's shoes...

Taken from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, the expression being the "salt of the Earth" is used in German as in English as encouragement for giving the best of oneself. The title of a book by Pope Benedict XVI, a song by the Rolling Stones, as well as of various other albums and films, the metaphor can also refer to a good, honest, hard-working person.

While it has nothing to do with salt, it does have to do with its constant companion: pepper. If you want to ban someone you don't like from your presence, you send them off to "wo der Pfeffer wächst" — where pepper grows. That means to disappear and never come back. Since black pepper originated in India, the German saying implied a faraway place.