We name the colours, we name the sounds, we have books on feelings and industries on taste - but we lable smells only good or bad or make comparison: the smell of a "".
There is no musical scale of smells, no spectrum, we can't explain a smell. On catching the slightest whiff though a past memory - "Oh that orchard near the river on the holiday with mum and dad when sister wore the funny hat and we were all so happy" - emerges. We can't take an instrument and play that smell back to another, we can't describe a smell so well as to evoke it unless we use the crude spectrum of shitty, fragrant, fruity or other.
This is perhaps why the smell is so able to recapture past memories but it does not explain why we have no language for smells, beyond the crude.
Red, yellow, pinky-blue, the shade of the autumnal hue, but if I had to tell you how it smelled, well, perhaps of poo?
Crescendos, melodies, A C D, flat sharp major, but you want to know how it smelled? Oh do us a favour!
I can't label this smell, I know it so well, this is the smell of peeled avocado mixed with a frshly washed china plate - you get me?
Smells like shit.
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