Salting
From Free net encyclopedia
- Salting is the preparation of food with edible salt.
- Rubbing salt into the wounds is an expression, now used for malicious verbal assaults of the type 'kicking someone while down', originating from the historical practice to rub open wounds -human flesh- with edible salt, which is extremely painful (it gave rise to the expression because after bloody corporal punishment it added a fearsome ordeal to the actual lashing; modern pharmaceutical alternatives such as iodine still have a similar effect) but works as a primitive disinfectant, as better medical care, while fairly urgent, was either unavailable, as often aboard a ship at sea, denied as in some prisons, or too expensive for the commoner's purse.
- Salting is also a labor union tactic used to organize a union at a non-union business. Union members or union activists hire on at a non-union business and assess workplace satisfaction and interest in organizing a union. Once the "salted" union employees determine that worker interest in organizing is sufficient, a meeting will be called with the purpose of forming an Organizing Committee. A card drive will then commence, and once a majority of workers sign cards, the National Labor Relations Board will be contacted and a date for an election set.
- Salting is also the colloquial name for a kind of scam. Historically, it involved minerals or other valuable resources being scattered on a piece of property so they would be “discovered” by a prospective buyer; modern salting may instead be performed on soil samples (see, for example, Bre-X). These scams were popular and difficult to prosecute because they played on the greed of the victim.
- An analogous practice, also called salting, is known to have been practiced (although this is certainly the exception rather than the rule) by historians and/or archaeologists who were such devoted proponents of a given theory that they saw nothing wrong with "supplementing" or "fortifying" the historical record, by providing counterfeit evidence or artifacts at excavation sites; Heinrich Schliemann, for instance, is believed to have engaged in this practice. With the rise of archaeology as a reputable science, deliberate artifact-salting by genuine researchers has become considerably rarer, and is grounds for professional censure.
- Salting the earth is the military practice of spreading salt on fields to make them unusable for crop-growing for several years, as a 'scorched earth' technique or a punishment.
- Salting is an area in the sea or close to the sea where sea-water is naturally evaporated to produce salt as a product.
- Salting is a cryptographic method to secure passwords.