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posted by martyb on Friday November 13 2015, @01:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-non-scents dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @01:55AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @01:55AM (#262453)

    Smell is more visceral than verbal - smell sensory probably don't have much linkage with the language bits of our brains.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 13 2015, @10:29AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday November 13 2015, @10:29AM (#262576) Homepage
    I don't see why smell should be more visceral than colour. Both were experienced almost entirely with our experiences and litterally in-your-face encounters with real world objects, and it seems perfectly predictable that both would be named in relation to objects which have that property. I'm unable to think of any colour apart from "red" which I can't map onto an object comparison. "Blue"'s a dodgy one, as its meaning across cognates ranges from white to black. So by paucity of abstract word definitions, smell and colour are indeed similar too, it's not just the viscerality they share.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @11:15AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @11:15AM (#262590)

      Maybe because you are one of them outlier weirdos. There is more to visual perception than just color. Varying degrees of abstraction modulate sensory perceptions, but smell hits up memory/emotion first/directly.