Hong Kong: Smells delicious!

Quick, give me an eight-letter English word that means “smells good.” If you instantaneously came up with “fragrant” or “aromatic,” then you’re probably very good at crossword puzzles. But if you didn’t, you shouldn’t feel bad, because English is relatively poor in smell words. Plenty of days probably pass without you using the word “fragrant,” but apparently, Cantonese-speaking people drop their equivalent word, heung, into conversation all the time (thus, Hong Kong, or “good-smelling harbor”) to say nothing of their negative smell words, which range from meaning “the ammoniacal smell of urine” to “the rancid smell of old grain.” Any way you cut it, there’s just no easy way to fit those into an English crossword.

If you’re wondering where I’m getting these little chestnuts, it’s my mom’s fault. She gave me the fascinating book The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky, and now I’m at risk of becoming the person at a party who insists on telling everyone the Cantonese word for the smell of burnt hair. (It’s lou.)

Initially, the section on our lack of smell words frustrated me. English (arguably) has more words than any other language! How could we have overlooked smell words? And come on, Jurafsky, we have plenty of taste words, and it’s so hard to differentiate between taste and smell. And yet, I see his point; there aren’t many words devoted solely to smell the way there are words devoted solely to taste. That is, you can’t tell how sweet something is from its smell, or I’d probably be better at baking.

We’re not alone in this, by the way; most languages are poor in smell words. One theory about why is that smell actually varies across populations more than other senses. Some people lack the ability to detect a certain grassy smell, for example. And you all know about the old asparagus pee problem. (A side note and possible correction to our previous asparagus pee info: Jurafsky mentions a “recent experiment” that indicates while 6 percent of people can’t detect the asparagus pee enzyme, 8 percent simply don’t produce the enzyme. He does not, however, describe how this experiment was conducted. I shudder to think.)

But don’t get too down about the lack of English smell words. We usually compensate by using words based on specific objects. (“Skunky,” for example, might literally mean “like a skunk,” but if you use it to describe a smell, trust me, I’ll know what you mean.) And besides, if there was a single word for “the smell of death,” Lynyrd Skynyrd might never have had to write a whole song about it. But pity the poor person who has to translate it into Cantonese.