SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Describe a banana. It's yellow, perhaps with some green edges. When peeled, it has a smooth, soft, mushy texture. It tastes sweet, maybe a little creamy.
And it smells like... well, it smells like a banana.
Every sense has its own "lexical field," a vast palette of dedicated descriptive words for colors, sounds, tastes, and textures. But smell? In English, there are only three dedicated smell words—stinky, fragrant, and musty—and the first two are more about the smeller's subjective experience than about the smelly thing itself.
...
Some scientists have taken this as evidence that humans have relegated smell to the sensory sidelines, while vision has taken center-field. It's a B-list sense, deemed by Darwin to be "of extremely slight service." Others have suggested that smells are inherently indescribable, and that "olfactory abstraction is impossible." Kant wrote that "Smell does not allow itself to be described, but only compared through similarity with another sense." Indeed, when Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the protagonist of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer can unerringly identify smells, remember them, and mix and match them in his head, he seems disconcerting and supernatural to us, precisely because we suck so badly at those tasks.
Hunter-gatherer groups appear to have many more words for smell.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Francis on Friday November 13 2015, @01:43AM
Colors are found on a spectrum and texture has similar properties for roughness and temperature. Likewise sound is a bit like light in that it has frequency and amplitude to describe it.
Smell is made by discreet particles and nobody has created a particular system that's as easy to understand. Sure it can smell like something, such as oranges or almonds, but that just means certain chemicals are there.
I don't need to have seen titanium white to know roughly what to expect, but describing something as smelling of freshly mowed lawn is meaningless if you don't already know it..
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday November 13 2015, @06:13PM
If it smells like a banana then it seems like we can use pretty much every noun to describe a smell. That seems like quite a few words to me...
but describing something as smelling of freshly mowed lawn is meaningless if you don't already know it..
Describe Red to a blind person.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday November 13 2015, @08:18PM
Red is light between approximately 620 and 750 nm. There done. Now, good luck describing that smell to anybody that hasn't smelled it. Yes, the definition of red isn't useful to a blind person, but they can understand that in relation to UV and X-Rays if they have to, both of which are completely relevant.
Whereas there is no way of describing smells without somebody being able to smell it.