salt in the wound
2
6.3
- idiom
- Informal
:
echar sal en la herida
- Guillermo Antonio Guevara Lacayo, a rightist member of the National Assembly, said that activists needed to stop "rubbing salt in the wound."
- rubbing salt in the wound
- pouring salt in the wound
And just like rubbing salt in the wound, AXI got got hacked.
- And just like rubbing salt in the wound, AXI got got hacked.
Examples
-
I feared I would be rubbing salt in the wound.
Blog text (5) -
No need to rub salt in the wound of the faithful.
Blog text (27) -
Why throw salt in the wound?
Blog text (29) -
What is this, rubbing salt in the wound?
-
But this is like rubbing salt in the wound.
Blog text (17) -
I don't want to rub salt in the wound, but Joe was...
-
The fact that Lynne had a child, he said, would be like rubbing salt in the wound.
Fiction book (1992) -
Part of me wants to be there to rub salt in the wound when he finds out that Obamacare doesn't cover what his wife needs.
Blog text (5) -
Chris rubs salt in the wound by taking the apparent "high road," with all the talk about how we agree on so much, why can't we get along, etc.
Blog text (28) -
Hearing that she also won the lottery was just salt in the wound after my recent financial troubles.
Synonyms
1
8.9
A hurtful comment or action that makes someone feel worse after bad news
Antonyms
How Hurtful
- Informal
2
6.3
- Informal
1
8.9
- Offensive
8
7.0
- Offensive
342
1.0
Surface Forms
Morphology
The metaphor is directly built from the literal image of putting salt into an open wound causing extra pain, so a learner who knows 'salt' and 'wound' can infer the figurative sense of making an already bad situation worse. This physical→figurative mapping is common across languages (e.g., Spanish, French) and follows a clear compositional logic, making the expression predictable for a B1 learner.
Etymology
The idiom salt in the wound comes from the simple image of putting salt on an open wound, which makes the pain much worse. So, it means 'something that makes an already bad or painful situation worse'.