Yesterday, a colleague at listen dot com was telling me about his band, Salty Dish, and somehow it came up that I was "interested in etymology". [Actually, I said something about salary and making ones daily salt.] Well, I perked up, as it's not every day that I run across somebody who uses the word casually in conversation or doesn't think it has something to do with the study of insects. Anyway, he wanted to know if Latin sal 'salt' and salus, salutis 'health' might be related. Of the top of my head, I said I thought not, but that I'd look into it. None of my reference dictionaries mentioned the possibility, but that doesn't mean much, I suppose. I was fascinated, as always when etymologizing, that Greek holos 'whole, entire' and Sanskrit sarva 'all, entire' were cognates.

As a result of this, I've been thinking about Malkiel's Studies in Irreversible Binomials. That is collocutions that are only used in one order: "Sturm und Drang", "hard and fast", and "hook, line, and sinker" (though the last is a trinomial).

The title of this entry has to do with Meillet's conjecture that Irish Gaelic slàn 'whole, healthy, safe' may have been une contamination from the Latin phrase salva ac sana. Without the -wo- suffix, the root in salvus yields sollus 'alone' and solidus 'solid'. It's interesting that the 'w' in whole is an addition in Early Modern English orthography. Whole is cognate with 'hale' (also from English) and 'hail' (borrowed from Norse). Safe and sound, Latin salvus ac validus, Old English hæl ond trum.

More to come: Hale and hearty; hearty-hale. Hearth and home. Health.