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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: 1) by D2 on Friday November 13 2015, @02:59AM
Trekkie and beer geek (decades brewing and judging) here, and that last sentence was one of the coolest I've read in ages. We do **SO** much metaphorical describing, and I'd never made that connection. So. Awesome.
There are personality words (bright, assertive, crisp to describe effervescence, playful, muted, bold, weak), and professionals are going to compound names (instead of buttery or cream-corn, we say Diethyl metasulfide or DMS; instead of horsey, we say brettanomyces). But early in learning to judge, we're all taught that because we don't regularly focus on distinctions or use a lexicon for taste and smell, that's going to be the challenge: coming up with words we can use to discuss flavor and aroma.
Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.