SALTATE

[Dr. Goodword]

• saltate •

Pronunciation: sôl-teyt • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Verb, intransitive

Meaning: 1. To leap, to spurt out. 2. To dance or dance about. (This word is not used in reference to people but to animals and inanimat objects.)

Notes: It is odd that we seldom hear this word, for it has a rather large family and is quite current in some quarters. Saltation, the noun refers to spurting fluid (such as blood) in medicine and a sudden mutation in genetics. In fact, saltationism is the hypothesis that major changes in species result from sudden mutations (leaps) rather than small, slow changes over time. Adjectives, meaning "leaping" or "dancing", include saltant, saltatory, saltative, and saltatorial.

In Play: Have you ever noticed stones and debris swirling around at the bottom of a stream? They are saltating: "After centuries of saltating in the currents of the river, the stones were all smooth and highly polished." The stones in motion are saltant. Saltation, in fact, occurs in many places: "Morris was captivated by the saltations of Gertrude's hair set in motion by the wind."

Word History: Today's Good Word was snipped from the past participle of the Latin verb saltare "to dance", the intensive variant of salire "to jump, leap". The same Latin verb is the origin of our verb sally, as to sally forth against Sally's defenses, and salient "jutting out". With various prefixes and suffixes it produced many French and Latin words that English helped itself to, including exult, insult, assail, assault, not to mention desultory. Salmon may have been borrowed by Latin itself from Gaulish but it seems fairly clearly a result of the same root, used in the sense of a jumping fish.

[Brazilian dude]

Today's Good Word was snipped from the past participle of the Latin verb saltare "to dance", the intensive variant of salire "to jump, leap".

Interesting that Latin salire has evolved into Spanish salir and Portuguese sair (to go out) and Italian salire (to go up).

Brazilian dude

[gailr]

In Play: Have you ever noticed stones and debris swirling around at the bottom of a stream? They are saltating: "After centuries of saltating in the currents of the river, the stones were all smooth and highly polished." The stones in motion are saltant.

Kind of like Brownian motion, on a larger scale, then...

-gailr