Why do we lack the vocabulary to define smells? We CAN say it smells LIKE something: freshly baking bread or a rose. But we never seem to have a strict vocabulary.We can say it is a red rose or a deep red rose or an orange red rose. But not so with smell.
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DA BEN DAN yanggui zi COAT
ANSWERS: 4
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No, I would say the way most smells are described in a pinch would be generally; sour, rotten, salty, sweet. Mostly taste words, but then our taste and olfactory are linked.
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Back to smiley faces..:) :) :) :) :) :) Color (unless one is color-blind) is factual, measureable and universally agreed upon..fragrance, odors, smells..that is entirely different. That depends upon the purity of the olfactory organ..I think it is probably comparable to taste buds..I can smell things Jim can't..I tasted a throat lozenge that was definitely Grapefruit in taste to me, but for Jim it had overtones of tangerine, but zero grapefruit taste. When there is uniformity of understanding, it is easier to describe something..when we each have a different experience when we taste something or smell something, that is far more difficult. :)
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Rosie made good points... maybe it's because humanoids are primarily visual creatures, with usually pretty poor senses of smell. Kind of related, have you ever looked at one of those wheel-shaped charts people use to describe how wines taste? The adjectives are from oakey and nutty all the way to something like "rubbery".
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Paradoxically, because they eye is in some ways a much cruder organ than the nose. The eye has only three different kinds of colour sensor - or less, for the colour-blind - whereas the nose had over 1000 different kinds of sensors. Furthermore, the sensors in the nose vary widely between people: the same chemical can smell mildly pleasant to some people, pungently awful to others, and not be smelt at all by others. We can therefore analyse the rainbow into six colours which, which black, white, brown, and gray, are all the colours for which languages have words which mean the only colours. All other colours are actually "like" names: orange is "same colour as that fruit", pink, lilac, violet etc are actually derived from flowers.and so on.
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