Salt-and-Pepper Cellar

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Vanita from Dallas.

Hello, Vanita.

I had a question for you guys, because I grew up in India, and I’ve always been taught that the little thing on the table with salt and pepper is called a salt and pepper cellar.

And then I came here, and everyone calls it a salt and pepper shaker.

And I wasn’t sure what the difference is.

Is there a difference in origins, or if it’s talking about slightly different devices?

Not sure.

Wait, you can have a pepper cellar?

Yeah, that’s what she said.

I thought so.

Oh, interesting, interesting.

Right?

Interesting.

And by that, you just mean the little bottles with the tops that have the holes in them?

Or like a pepper grinder?

Yes.

I mean, whatever you kept at the table to put salt and pepper on your food at a meal time.

I grew up calling them cellars.

Both of them, the salt and the pepper.

That’s interesting.

Yes.

I’ve never heard of a pepper cellar.

Well, now we have.

Now we have.

We’re learning something new every day.

And how are you spelling cellar?

That’s the other question.

C-E-L-L-A-R?

The traditional use is salt cellar, C-E-L-L-A-R, like that.

Right.

Specifically referring to the thing that holds the salt.

Right, yeah.

It goes back to a Middle English word, cellar, that’s related to the Latin word for salt.

It came to us through French.

Yeah, so that’s why we were curious about the pepper cellar.

Yeah.

Because the spelling changed to conform to the spelling of the basement room, you know, the cellar.

Yeah.

And it has in its etymology salt as the root.

So salt cellar has always actually kind of been a little redundant anyway, which is really nice.

It’s a nice little linguistic thing there.

But to call it a pepper cellar means we’ve got some new transference where we’ve lost that notion of salt on the word cellar.

And we can now use it for any spice at the table maybe.

That’s cool.

Interesting.

That’s very cool.

I just was taught to call it a salt and pepper cellar.

I don’t think we ever thought through the origins of the word there.

Yeah.

Yeah, so we’ve got it back as far as the 1400s.

Sailor, seller, siller, something like that.

Lots of variety of spellings.

And they all just refer to the thing that you keep the salt on on the table.

Yeah, and the word salt itself was sometimes used for that container back in the day.

I mean, those words have sort of been very slippery.

There we go.

That’s very interesting.

That’s why you do it.

And, you know, India sometimes does hang on to older forms of English that the rest of the English-speaking world has let go.

So maybe this is why it’s more common there than it is here.

But I think many Americans, particularly ones who read a lot, probably know it.

Well, that’s interesting.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, and thanks for sharing that with us.

I’d be interested to hear if anybody else calls it a pepper cellar.

Right, right.

I want to know that.

Is that a new thing that we’ve caught on to hear?

Vanita, you might have turned us on to something cool.

Well, I’m glad.

All right.

Take care.

Thank you.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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