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posted by martyb on Friday November 13 2015, @01:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the that's-non-scents dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1) by Francis on Friday November 13 2015, @08:18PM

    by Francis (5544) on Friday November 13 2015, @08:18PM (#262813)

    Red is light between approximately 620 and 750 nm. There done. Now, good luck describing that smell to anybody that hasn't smelled it. Yes, the definition of red isn't useful to a blind person, but they can understand that in relation to UV and X-Rays if they have to, both of which are completely relevant.

    Whereas there is no way of describing smells without somebody being able to smell it.