Thursday, June 28, 2012

1770 Smellable

Recently, when I wrote an essay on the billowing smoke coming out of Burger King, I was hard put to find a word. I had said the smoke was visible. But I also wanted to say it was smellable.
But is there such a word? A word that describes the state of something being sensed by someone's nasal sense organ? When it's visible it's being sensed by your eyes. When it's audible it's being sensed by your ears. But your nose. Who knows?
So off to the thesaurus. It offers "odorous." But that sounds value laden. When something is visible it's value neutral. If it's odorous, you kind of think it stinks. Even though there's malodorous if you don't like it even more. Or stinky.
On the other end there's fragrant. Which again, implies a value judgment. There's also redolent for really strong saturated smells. And effluvious. That I like, but somehow it sounds a little like effluent, which is often just a nice way of saying sewage.
Speaking of which, there are all kinds of cool words for stinky. Fetid, stinking, noisome, olid, reeking, nidorous, stenchy, foul, vile, putrid, fecal, fulsome, noxious, graveolent, rotten, rank, gamy, rancid, musty, funky, fusty, moldy, mildewy, and miasmic.
Apparently we've developed a fairly fine-tuned vocabulary when it comes to not so nice nose perceptions.
The thesaurus also suggested the words sniffable or whiffable.
"Ah, what a fine wine. I find the bouquet incredibly whiffable."
Oddly the thesaurus does say there is such a word as smellable, even though my spellcheck redlines it. But they offered up an even better word that made me feel extremely foolish because I totally overlooked it. Maybe because it was plain as the nose on my face.
Smelly.
America, ya gotta love it.

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