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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @02:30AM
Most of those words are reference to things that smell alike.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @03:06AM
And what is left are measures of smell magnitude or other subjectivity thus yielding no information about the smell itself but only information about what an observer feels about that smell.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Friday November 13 2015, @03:17AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @03:27AM
There are square, edgy, round, bright, dim, sharp, scratchy, smooth, etc., etc., - so many other options for other sensory perceptions, unlike smell.