Salt of the Earth

Straight from Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 5:13: "Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?" His audience for the sermon was made up of ordinary fishers, shepherds, and labourers, and the phrase was a genuine compliment about their worth and integrity, not about flavour but about salt's older, more practical role as a preservative, something that keeps other things from spoiling. The phrase reached English by the late 14th century, appearing in Chaucer's The Summoner's Tale, and has kept its sense of quiet, unglamorous decency ever since.