Hiking and mountain walks

Late in the list come prendre un azimut and l’azimut inverse, and the word they share is one English already owns twice over without noticing. Arabic as-samt means the way, the direction; its plural as-sumūt is what medieval Latin borrowed as azimut, and that is the bearing a walker sets on a compass before stepping into mist. The same singular travelled a second time, inside the phrase samt ar-ra’s, the path over the head — the point directly above where you are standing. Latin scribes copied that one by hand, and somewhere in the copying the m was read as ni: samt became senit, then cenith in Old French, and at last « zenith ». So the word for a line drawn across a valley and the word for the highest point of the sky are a single Arabic noun, one of them carrying a scribe’s mistake for eight hundred years. Nothing in English shows the join, which is why azimut reads as an instrument term and « zenith » as poetry. On a hillside in fog they are the same idea used twice over: a direction taken from wherever your feet happen to be.