salient

Picture a medieval coat of arms: a lion described as salient is not merely present but caught in the act of springing forward. The word arrived in English in the 1560s from Latin salientem, “leaping,” and its military sense preserves the same visual idea—a salient is a bulge thrust outward from a defensive line. Later, “salient point” acquired a wonderfully strange intellectual history: Aristotle used Latin punctum saliens, “the leaping point,” for the embryonic heart he thought seemed to move inside an opened egg. From that tiny imagined heartbeat came the modern sense of the most noticeable or important point in an argument. Its relatives keep leaping too: a circus rider in Latin could be desultory by jumping down from one galloping horse to another, while someone who exults figuratively leaps for joy. Remember salient as a word that refuses to sit flat: it either projects from the landscape or jumps out of the sentence.