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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.
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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, Informative) by fermento on Friday November 13 2015, @11:07AM
I have worked for a flavor company, so have some experience with this. The challenge for the flavorists are that they have to interpret what flavor the customer wants. You want a cherry flavor? Is that black cherry, sweet cherry, tart cherry, etc?
There is somewhat of a standardized vocabulary amongst flavorists that help to describe smells. The descriptors can be based upon a variety of comparisons:
Colors: Pink = peppermint (think pepto-bismol). Green = fresh cut grass (primarily cis-3-hexenol), Brown = maple syrup like
Materials (basically how they taste): woody, cardboard, ashy
Unpleasant things: animallic (basically smells like s**t, skatole), my favorite is "catty" (cat urine)
It is pretty impressive when you taste something with a flavorists. I'm tasting it, think I know what this is, but I can't describe it. A flavorist will taste it and start describing it. While they are giving their impression, you're thinking "That's exactly it".
(Score: 0) by oldmac31310 on Friday November 13 2015, @10:26PM
What were they making that needed to taste or smell like animal shit or cat piss? I am intrigued, but a little put off my food.
(Score: 1) by fermento on Sunday November 15 2015, @11:29AM
Complex aromas in nature have 100's of chemicals that interact with your nose (aroma), tongue (taste), and other nerves (think cold, hot, thick). Fakey flavors (think cherry Kool-Aid) only use a small amount of chemicals that drive the main taste. For better authentic flavors, you need to add more, typically at lower levels. This tends to give the nuances of flavor.
Things like animallic notes are used at very low levels (ppb-ppm) in dairy type flavors. (maybe these compounds are carried through from the animal or during the milking process).