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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Definition Drift, WAS: Bowditch 1995 Table 18
From: Jim Thompson
Date: 2005 Feb 3, 17:04 -0400
From: Jim Thompson
Date: 2005 Feb 3, 17:04 -0400
> -----Original Message----- > From: Bill > > Smyth's 1867 definition of "Horizon" was even more interesting: "The > > apparent or visible circle which bounds our vision at sea; it is a line > > which is described by the sky and water appearing to meet. This is > > designated as the sensible horizon; the rational or true one > being a great > > circle of the heavens, parallel to the sensible horizon, > > Darn words! Looking up sensible and sensible horizon on the net a while > back, and sensible is generally what we can see/perceive. Hence my > confusion until I found the "nautical" meaning which you et al cleared up > for me. Agreed. I spent a fair bit of time searching for some meaning of the word, "sensible" and how that could have become attached to the concept of "sensible horizon", which is not at all sensible to the neophyte, in any sense of the word that I can discover. Jim