Alan Ackmann
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Smell Dictionary
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Smell Dictionary
Greetings, everyone! This is one of the website’s more distinctive features: a dictionary of smells that serves as one of my ongoing projects.
What is it?
The nutshell context is that my wife was born without a sense of smell, and so she misses out on the scent of everything from pumpkin pie to lemon Pledge to Yellowstone tar-pits. Sad, no? Well, about four years ago, in an effort to make up for her lack of sense (Ha!), I wrote a dictionary of smells in which I tried to describe various scents as clearly as possible without ever actually saying what something literally smells like. Challenging, yes, but my wife tells me that a combination of characterization and synesthesia actually works quite well. The problem, however, is that smells (and their interpretations) are subjective, so what I think something smells like might not resemble what somebody else thinks it smells like—a fact that has made my wife curious.
Write one yourself!
In order to correct this limitation, I thought it might be fun to open the project to a larger audience, and invite anybody who is interested to submit a brief description of their favorite (or least favorite) smells. I’ve provided some sample entries to get you started, and if you’d like to contribute just follow the instructions. Ideally, this enhancement will result in different descriptions of the same smell, as well as wider variety. Particularly distinctive entries will be posted on this page of the website, and will also be included in the next volume of the dictionary—which for the record doesn’t have a distribution any larger than my wife’s bookshelf.
For the curious, lacking a sense of smell does alter my wife’s sense of taste, reducing it by about thirty percent. For the even more curious, I am actually colorblind. We therefore run the risk of any offspring operating at sixty percent sensory capacity, making your own contributions even more vital. So fire away!
SAMPLE ENTRIES:
LEMON
If Lemon had to pick one verb to subsist on for the rest of its days, that verb would be “tickle.” It is a younger scent, probably about three or four years old, if one could place it, and it would enjoy giggling. It comes out of nowhere to tackle you, and once you get over the initial shock it can be quite pleasant, even joyful. For a lot of people, though, Lemon doesn’t know when to quite. It’s not malicious, but like a small child who doesn’t understand when the game of tickling isn’t fun anymore, it just keeps coming. But you can’t deny it its enthusiasm. Also, by virtue of its sheer relentlessness, Lemon is often used in cleaners. It goes after other smells aggressively. When Lemon overtakes another smell, however, I don’t picture that smell submitting; I picture it running away. Level of Intensity: 10
ROOT BEER
This is a biased one for me, because I have always loathed the taste – and therefore the smell – of root beer, which reminds me of thick, loamy branches, moist with mildew and rot. Other people, I am told, find the smell quite pleasant, and respond to the brownblack thickness, but I can’t move past the soot like texture of the smell, which has always seemed ponderous and sluggish. The smell strikes me as short, and fat, and stupid. And try as I might, I can’t perceive it any other way. Level of Intensity: 10
INSTRUCTIONS FOR SMELL SUBMISSIONS:
Click on the “Add a Smell Entry of Your Own” link below and fill out the form. If you’d like to learn more about her disability, visit her new website at neversmell.com.
