Interesting inquiry from Russell Smith in Thursday’s Globe about the language we use to describe smells.
All I was wondering about was categories of words, and why smells seem to fall into one category (metaphor or comparison) and other descriptors don’t.
But, as a few linguists pointed out to me, I wasn’t entirely right in making this distinction. It’s not so cut and dried. For example, I suggested that words for textures – smooth, rough, spiky, soft – are basic or abstract words, not derived from substances. But spiky comes from spike. (D’oh. I should have said “hard,” dammit.) And if you look into the etymologies of almost any of these words, you’ll find that at their origin they came from something concrete. Even colours. Green, for example, is related to the Old English growan, to grow, from a Proto-Indo-European base gro or gre, for that which grows. (The base also gives us the word grass.) Purple comes from the Latin purpura, which comes from the Greek porphyra, and was the name of a mollusk that the ancients got dye from (guess what colour?). Orange comes from the name of the fruit. Pink is a kind of flower.
This is interesting to think about in the context of art. Will vocabulary be forced to expand as more artists work with smell in spaces?
