Welcome to the inaugural link post for Perambulations. I’m not very active on other social media, and my love language is sending links, so I thought I’d try posting a choice set of cyber delectations here on a quarterly basis. Without further ado…
I've always found it strange how few words we have for smells and whether that's cultural or neurological. I'm pretty much completely incapable of describing a smell with anything other than comparing it to another smell. Imagine how strange it would be if we couldn't describe the way something looks as anything other than "that looks like a tree" or "that looks like a rock." And yet, for those of us who aren't perfumers, that's about the best we've got for a pretty important sense that can save your life if there's a fire or spoiled food. I found this to be an unsatisfactory explanation: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/the-vocabulary-of-smell/414618/
Perhaps the farthest it gets away from reference to a physical substance is when it refers to things like amber that are actually blends of different molecules traditionally used in perfumery. I feel like this has become more prominent as completely synthetic molecules like aldehydes have become more important in perfumery. Since many don't smell like anything in nature, we often just say that they smell "aldehydic."
The vocabulary for more abstract qualities of scents is so scarce that I've even been in a class where we resorted to bouba/kiki to describe scents.
I've always found it strange how few words we have for smells and whether that's cultural or neurological. I'm pretty much completely incapable of describing a smell with anything other than comparing it to another smell. Imagine how strange it would be if we couldn't describe the way something looks as anything other than "that looks like a tree" or "that looks like a rock." And yet, for those of us who aren't perfumers, that's about the best we've got for a pretty important sense that can save your life if there's a fire or spoiled food. I found this to be an unsatisfactory explanation: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/11/the-vocabulary-of-smell/414618/
You might be surprised at how referential even perfumer's language is around scents. For example, check out the scent families listed on Perfumer's Apprentice, which sells extracts and chemicals for perfumery: https://shop.perfumersapprentice.com/c-67-shop-by-olfactory-family.aspx
Perhaps the farthest it gets away from reference to a physical substance is when it refers to things like amber that are actually blends of different molecules traditionally used in perfumery. I feel like this has become more prominent as completely synthetic molecules like aldehydes have become more important in perfumery. Since many don't smell like anything in nature, we often just say that they smell "aldehydic."
The vocabulary for more abstract qualities of scents is so scarce that I've even been in a class where we resorted to bouba/kiki to describe scents.