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: 2) by FatPhil on Friday November 13 2015, @09:59AM
> doggy
smelling like a dog - did you read TFS?
> lemony
smelling like a lemon - did you read TFS?
> lilac
smelling like a lilac - did you read TFS?
> mildewed
smelling like mildew - did you read TFS?
> minty
smelling like mint - did you read TFS?
> moldy
smelling like mold - did you read TFS?
> piney
smelling like pine - did you read TFS?
> plastic
smelling like plastic - did you read TFS?
> rose
smelling like a rose - did you read TFS?
> skunky
OH FOR FUCKS SAKE! Almost every single one of your words is not a counter-example to the claim. Pungent, you can have. Putrid and rancid are borderline, but I'd say they were comparison with the smell of rotting stuff.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves