salto mortale

English

Etymology

From Italian salto (“leap”) + mortale (“deadly”).

Noun

salto mortale (plural salti mortali)

1. A dangerous and daring jump with possibly lethal outcome.
2. (figuratively) A risky, dangerous or crucial step or undertaking.
   • 1867 July, William Dean Howells, “At Padua”, in The Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics, volume XX, № CXVII, chapter i, page 25/1:

     I take shame to myself…for having been more taken by the salti mortali* of a waiter who summed up my account at a Paduan restaurant, than by all the strategies with which the city has been many times captured and recaptured.
     * Salti mortali are those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic by which Italian waiters, in verbally presenting your account, arrive at six as the product of two and two.

   • 1919, Boris Sidis, The Source and Aim of Human Progress:

     The frenzied, suggestible, gregarious, subconscious self, freed from all rational restraints, celebrated its delirious orgies, its corybantic bacchanalia, held its mad salto mortale over the grave of crucified humanity.

Translations

a dangerous and daring jump with possibly lethal outcome

• Finnish: surmanhyppy
• Italian: salto mortale m
• Limburgish: sentemetaal (li) m
• Russian: са́льто-морта́ле (ru) n (sálʹto-mortále)

(figuratively) a risky, dangerous or crucial step or undertaking

• Finnish: surmanhyppy
• Italian: salto mortale m, salto nel buio m
• Russian: са́льто-морта́ле (ru) n (sálʹto-mortále)

References

• “salto mortale”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000.