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Origin likely
“Take it with a pinch of salt”
What it means
To treat something with scepticism.
Where it comes from
The pinch is a genuine apothecary measure, roughly an eighth of a teaspoon, and it appears in pharmacopoeias as a recognised if approximate quantity.
How sure are we?
Traced to Pliny the Elder, who recorded an antidote to poison taken addito salis grano — with a grain of salt added. The pinch is a later British substitution; American English still says grain, preserving Pliny’s word. Whether the salt was meant to make the antidote palatable or the story more digestible has been argued over for two thousand years.