Happy reading,
A seasoned old salt
A seasoned old sailor (and sometimes wild and gruff)
The not-foolish fishmongers of Bar-sur-Loup, where one finds parallel sea bass on their stalls, know that the sea bass is also a wolf, not a thug for all that, whereas the wolf is not necessarily a sea bass. For if the wolf, which hunts, hunts itself or is fished, the sea bass, which also hunts, is only fished[1].
From that point on, the question one might ask is the following: can you throw an old salt out of a bar? I leave you to ponder this highly existential question.
The wolf (the one that hunts and is hunted) is an animal that normally lives within a pack, a social group with a certain hierarchy. But for various reasons, some wolves sometimes leave the pack and live, at least for a while, in solitude.
From an anthropomorphic perspective, before the behavior of these canids was better understood, they were then considered to be asocial animals, incapable of integration.
It is thus, by comparison with what was imagined of lone wolves, that the sailor, made wild and unsociable by his profession and fond of living apart from others, was designated by the phrase "old salt" in the mid-eighteenth century (the 1832 dictionary of the Académie française indeed gives as its definition: "A sailor who has lost all sense of the world through constant time at sea").
And then, the sailor who, having managed to grow old, was necessarily experienced, had his wild and gruff side partly relegated to the past, and the expression eventually came to simply denote a seasoned sailor (note, incidentally, that the “young salt” is mentioned a hundred times less often).
[1] In the large family of fish, the sea bass is called the wolf in the Mediterranean. But if a sea bass is a wolf, not all wolves, of which there are different varieties, are sea basses. The sea bass is a predator that hunts smaller fish and also attacks crustaceans.
Be that as it may, the old salt is easily recognizable; besides the cap adorned with an anchor and the inevitable oilskin, several signs allow for his instant identification: the weathered face sculpted by the spray, the swaying gait accustomed to the roll and betraying the habit of tacking at the slightest Change of wind, and finally the assurance with which, gazing at the sky with a dull expression while puffing on his foam pipe, he predicts the weather for the next day, more infallible than The Hierophant issuing his bull.
Jean-Paul Plantive, Michel Guérard - Little Almanac of Improbable and Vanished Trades - 2001
The rain was falling, the wind howling in a dreadful manner; fortunately, the crew proved to be excellent, and all the maneuvers were carried out with a zeal that probably saved the Eloysa. The storm was so fierce that the captain, a seasoned old salt, admitted he had never seen anything like it, and Mr. Pietro Plomer, who had made the voyage from America to Europe four times, fully concurred.
Edouard Charton - Around the World - New Journal of Travel - 1861
Marylena