Geography and earth science

The third entry is o cume, the top of a mountain, and it comes straight from the Latin culmen, the ridge of a roof and then any high point. Portuguese wore it down and left it where it began: o cume is a place a walker can stand on, and o cume estava coberto de neve is about snow and nothing else. English owns the same Latin word and has lost the mountain from it entirely. It arrived late and out of the books, as the verb « culminate » and the noun « culmination », and both are abstract: a campaign culminates in a rally, a quarrel reaches its culmination, and nobody has ever climbed to one. For the thing itself English had to go elsewhere — to « summit », from the Latin summus, highest, and to « peak », which is native and carries no Latin. Two habits follow. A Portuguese sentence containing cume is nearly always about real rock; and where it is not, as in o cume da carreira, English says the peak or the height of a career, keeping « culmination » for the moment at which something finally arrives.