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, @08:22AM
Maybe those words aren't used much because it's much easier to describe by comparison. I had to think for a while but there are definitely more than 3 English words to describe smells that aren't comparisons. Outside of stinky, fragant and musty there's rancid, brine, pungent, volatile, heavy. There are probably more, but I'm not a native speaker.
(Score: 1) by S.O.B. on Saturday November 14 2015, @12:27AM
Outside of stinky, fragant and musty there's rancid, brine, pungent, volatile, heavy. There are probably more, but I'm not a native speaker.
Rancid is a comparison to decomposing oils or fats. Brine is a noun but briny is a comparison to the sea or salt water.
Volatile is not commonly used to describe smell.
Pungent and heavy are not comparisons but as the original article suggests they are not used exclusively to describe smell.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.