"Creaturely" and our vocabulary for scents

Since our discussion yesterday, I’ve been thinking about smells. Partially because Elizabeth brought up that Twenty One Pilots song with the lines: “Sometimes a certain smell will take me back to when I was young / Howcome I’m never able to identify where it’s coming from?” and that song is a tune, but partially because it’s strange to me how dull our capacity for olfactory sensory experience—as humans, at least—is from other animals.

It’s funny that we have such weak noses, and yet we spend tons of money on smelling good. Johnston points out the irony on page 7, when he says that we can walk into any steak house and “detect the steroidal odors of exotic creatures on both men and women” and none of the actual odors of human beings. Through the holidays, I worked in retail cosmetics and sold a ton of perfumes. The scent industry (perfumes and colognes but also shampoos, body-washes, etc) is massive and often expensive, and yet despite the huge variety of scents out there, I listened to every customer describe often completely different scents with the same five words—musky, spicy, floral, sweet, clean, (bad). Of those five words, spicy, sweet, and clean are adjectives for other senses that we’ve just learned to attribute to scents. Our scent-based lexicon is insanely small.

Truly the most important scent.

Later on the same page, Johnston argues that we have “little language proper to smell,” meaning we have little ability to convey distinct scents without using metaphors from other senses, or just the name of the thing we’re smelling (popcorn smells like popcorn tastes, so we say things with similar smells smell like popcorn, etc). And, if the theory that humans need words for concepts in order to understand them, this would explain a big reason we tend to have such a dull sense of smell. Obviously, this is mostly biological capability, but it could potentially be linguistic too.

So this got me thinking about whether this is a specifically English language (or even specifically Indo-European) phenomemon, that we potentially have fewer words for scents than other languages. So I did as one does and I took to Google for an answer.

England really doesn't understand Microsoft Excel.

As it turns out, I found these two articles discussing a 2014 study (which may have continued into 2015, the dates are unclear) in which researchers found two small Southeast Asian groups whose native languages have specific dedicated smell words. One was the Jahai people of Malaysia and the other the Maniq of Thailand. And researchers compared their ability to distinguish smells and to distinguish colors and compared it with a small group of native English-speakers. This is what they found:

Although the volunteers tended to describe each smell and color in their own words, it quickly became clear that Jahai speakers could describe colors and odors with equal precision, while English speakers showed less aptitude for smells than for colors. While Jahai speakers' ability to distinguish smells averaged out just a few percentage points below their ability to distinguish colors, English speakers' odor-naming precision averaged out to less than one tenth of their color distinction specificity.

So, while their language obviously doesn’t increase their biological sense of smell, it increases their ability to distinguish smells. So, even if we don’t have to have specific words for a concept to understand it, it seems clear that language heavily influences our sensory experience, whether it’s our ability to name scents like the Jahai's cŋεs—the smell of gas, smoke, and bat droppings—or how many colors we can distinguish in English-speaking societies as opposed to the African Himba society.

So I ask this: Can we not understand Derrida’s cat or the bears Treadwell filmed because of the limits placed on us by our language? Could the Jahai better understand Johnston's dog that us, native English speakers could? Or is this a problem with not just our own language, but language as a concept—does it limit our ability to encounter? Or is language what allows us to get closer to the sensory experience of those ways of being?