1151: Few Words for Smells Feb 2, 2018

There are a number of adjectives that can be used to describe how something looks, or feels. Of course, it is sometimes easier to observe what else something is like e.g. "this brick feels like a rock", but using words like colors or others like 'pale' for vision and other words like 'hard', 'soft' rough' etc. there are plenty of ways to describe the way something appears or feels using these more abstract adjectives. This is also true of tastes and sounds, for example with 'sweet' and 'savoury' or 'loud' and 'quiet'. Certainly there is also some crossover because of how people can assume that one sense would not contradict another, so something can look smooth because it is assumed to feel smooth. None of this information should be surprising to an English speaker, but when it comes to scents there is a certain lack of adjectives. Bad smells are comparatively easy to describe with words like 'stinky' and 'putrid', and people can say something has a 'strong' or 'putrid' smell, but most of the time people need to rely upon relating smells to other things. One's sense of smell is comparatively the weakest of all of these five, and mattered little unless something might have smelled as if it would be unhealthy to consume or otherwise be near, so people were not as inclined to make new adjectives, but there certainly is the potential for it. Languages that don't have words for certain colors also sometimes relate it to other things, such as relating something that could be called 'blue' to the sky.
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