".. they had carried back down to the four-dimensional world the memories of the way it had been before Lepidopt's salvific jump."
-Tim Powers, Three Days to Never (2006)

Salvific. Does it not have a cosmetic ( organic ingredients ) ring to it?

salve. makes sense.

Interesting; would 'redeeming' have served the same purpose, do you think?

in this context (which you can see at amazon if you've bought there) he shades toward 'saving'; in fact, earlier in the para. he uses the word saved, so he probly was searching for a synonym in order to avoid repeating himself.
-ron o.

better than salvatific? or salvationic?

better too, than salvatonic.

salvatonic That sounds like it ought to be an after-shave lotion!

Ave atque salve quoth the Roman. Be hale and be well.

Or hair-conditioner!

Salve Regina,
Mater Misericordiae.....
(beautiful old Latin hymn to the Madonna)
Hail, O Queen
Mother of Mercy.......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salve_regina

Ok I think i would like to see the dictionary for this word.
It's make sense it sounds like a key chain logo .
Oh I get i heard it form on of my friend he say that it is a wine name found in other countries (don't know what country).

"It [a pyramid] had been excavated forty years earlier, the apartment floors strained and sifted, the chacs removed and crated and sent to Philadelphia." - Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise (1981)

chacs were Mayan rain gods, here to be understood as representations of some sort, one surmises.

link Also called chaaks? These seem to be just little ornamental brick steps.

link
This one is better.

Neat picture, Branny; though I'm not sure what I'm looking at. Mercy, they certainly put a LOT of work into all that. I saw a documentary on the Maya the other day; I think it said they believed there were something like thirteen levels of what Christians today would call Hell. Or maybe all of their existence, period. Anyway, the television people went down in this cave, and found artifacts on different levels, saying the deepest one would have been terrifying for any who felt they had to go down there (for meditation, or whatever).
It's interesting to speculate on what people 2000 years from now will think of our beliefs (and I don't necessarily mean religious). I kind of wish I could time-travel, so I could find out what things we don't understand or haven't invented yet!

The colorless picture shows 13 of those 'things' at the edges.
(the first or 13th just outside the frame)

This is wiki infomation I found on the subject.
Maya: "Vertically, the sky was divided into thirteen layers, while the underworld is often claimed to have consisted of nine layers."
Christian: / "Dante: Hell (underworld ) according to Dante consisted of nine cirkels."

* Could it be the 13 'things' represent the layers of heaven as they go upward? ( Maybe underground there are nine hidden going downward? ) I'd like to take that trip too. What first, backwards or forwards?

Not interested in hell myself.
Religion is for people afraid of going to hell.
Spirituality is for people who have already been there.

I wasn't meaning hell to time-travel to, but Neanderthalers and Mars.

"If I was not trying out the part of flâneur I was watching C-SPAN coverage of the impeachment proceedings."
- Joseph O'Neill, Netherland (2008)

link

is this a common French term? (I've labeled it as obscure, in English).

flâneur

From an online French dictionary:

Je chante le chien crotté, le chien sans domicile, le chien flâneur, le chien saltimbanque (BAUDEL., Poèm. prose, 1867, p. 223). (Of the filthy dog I sing, the homeless dog, the sauntering dog, the picaresque dog.)

Souriant à sa joliesse, comme une belle flâneuse (ROLLAND, J.-Chr., Foire, 1908, p. 818). (Smiling at her cuteness, like an itinerant beauty.)

It's a common French word. It's a common Dutch word too. Only we took the little roof off.

Salut Baudelaire.

also from this novel, and coincidentally:
"But the sighting had served as a luxurious instance of the city's ceaseless affirmation of its salvific worth.."

(Bran, you might enjoy this book; it's the story of a Dutch ex-pat living in New York City in the aftermath of 9/11. O'Neill was born in Ireland and raised primarily in Holland, and has worked mostly in London and New York.)

Thanks for the hint, tsuwm. I've read some online revieuws and saw our public library has it. It's on my library list now as it looks pretty interesting.

one of those French phrases I've never totally grasped, here used nounily (sure, adjectives and nouns - inseparable)

"I shook [her] hand. "How do you do," I said with as much conventionality as I could muster, as if an ostentatious show of comme il faut might minimize her son's aberrancy and the dark, inordinately troubling gap in my smile and the collapse of law and order betokened by the detectives surrounding us and, this particular slope being a slippery one, the hellishness of the world." O'Neill, ibid

here, correctness in deportment or behavior?

Looks like it to me.

'correctness in deportment or behavior.'

Here it is means exactly what you say.

Common in French and in Dutch. Correctness in deportment or behaviour.
But both in French and in Dutch it also means correctness, straightforwardness of moral behavior. I often heard it used when French people were discussing some actions or decisions:

"Oui, voilà, mais ce n'est pas tout à fait comme il faut quandmême."
or in Dutch:
"Ja, maar dat is tòch niet helemaal comme il faut."

It may concern little business transactions, social conduct, politics and such.

"; when we reached the lot John and Luster and Gabe ( the three mules and the horse too ) were still watching the still-swinging side gate through which Boon had just vanished, carrying the pistol in his hand. John and Father looked at eachother for about ten seconds while the whole edifice of entendre-de-noblesse collapsed into dust. Though the noblesse, the oblige, still remained."

Coming close now to the end of 1004 pages Faulkner and this fragment shows some similarity to the nouned "comme il faut" .

Faulkner is a writer I have to keep a dictionary standby for. Not for the dialect parts, which are fine, but for many maybe a bit out of use words; old but new to me. From the parts I read online I saw I will have to do that also for O'Neill. For new new to me words.

I used the verb spaghettify as the wwftd a while back, but today I read the noun form:
Scientists call this process spaghettification. And the black hole, as if in appreciation of the analogy, slurps you down. - Philip Plait Ph.D., Death from the Skies!

link
For those who understand.
As for me, I'll approach those plates of spaghetti with care from now on and warn the little one to stay away from black holes.

>noun form

aside: I really blew the opportunity to use the term nounification, in the event.
-joe (at the event horizon) friday

Yes, but you opportunized the moment to make up for it.

A word I read yesterday: cumulonimbus
"A cumulonimbus theatre towered over Athens's Syntagma Square."(From Fugitive Pieces by Canadian Anne Michaels) A word I had to look up. I knew it was about clouds but not which type of clouds.
I recommend the book as beautiful in writing as well as in contents.

Now I'm off into the Joseph O'Neill book "Netherland". Perfect to take on vacation, though I need to bring a small dictionary.

Also taking on vacation : "Ararat" by Frank Westerman. A Dutch writer for a change, but one who has been translated in many languages: review

>I need to bring a small dictionary.

good luck with that small dictionary!

> good luck with that small dictionary!

Sure, the pocket size india paper OEDTravellightEditon.
+ I know what's cricket, know the terminology as cricket is always everywhere played in English.