The English language has a meager stock of words to express the olfactory sense. In addition to the word smell, fewer than a dozen commonly used nouns name this sensation: odor, scent, vapor, fume, aroma, fragrance, perfume, bouquet, stench, and stink. Although there are other, rarer words like fetor and effluvium, few writers use them, probably for fear that their readers will not know them. Few verbs describe receiving or sending odors—smell, sniff, waft—but a fair number of detailing adjectives are available: redolent, pungent, aromatic, perfumed, stinking, musty, rancid, putrid, rank, fetid, malodorous, foul, acrid, sweet, and cloying.
Here is an example of how Amanda Coyne, in her essay in Chapter 3, uses smell in a description:
Occasionally, a mother will pick up her present and bring it to her nose when one of the bearers of the single flower—her child—asks if she likes it. . . . But most of what is being smelled today is the children themselves. While the other adults are plunking coins into the vending machines, the mothers take deep whiffs from the backs of their children’s necks, or kiss and smell the backs of their knees, or take off their shoes and tickle their feet and then pull them close to their noses. They hold them tight and take in their own second scent—the scent assuring them that these are still their children and that they still belong to them.
—AMANDA COYNE, “The Long Good-Bye: Mother’s Day in Federal Prison”
Coyne uses smell to describe “convict moms” and their children in a prison visiting room.
In addition to using smell as a verb, Coyne describes the repeated action of bringing the object being smelled to the nose, an act that not only signifies the process of smelling but also underscores its intimacy. To further emphasize intimacy, Coyne connects smelling with other intimate acts of kissing, tickling, pulling close, and holding tight.
Because she is not describing her own experience of smell, Coyne does not try to find words to evoke the effect the odor has on her. In the next passage, however, Frank Conroy uses comparing in addition to naming and detailing to describe how the smell of flowers affected him:
The perfume of the flowers rushed into my brain. A lush aroma, thick with sweetness, thick as blood, and spiced with the clear acid of tropical greenery.
—FRANK CONROY, Stop-Time
Naming the objects from which smells come can also be very suggestive:
The odor of these houses was different, full of fragrances, sweet and nauseating. On 105th Street the smells were of fried lard, of beans and car fumes, of factory smoke and home-made brew out of backyard stills. There were chicken smells and goat smells in grassless yards filled with engine parts and wire and wood planks, cracked and sprinkled with rusty nails. These were the familiar aromas: the funky earth, animal and mechanical smells which were absent from the homes my mother cleaned.
—LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ, Always Running: Gang Days in L.A.
Turn to John T. Edge’s “I’m Not Leaving Until I Eat This Thing” in Chapter 3 (pp. 69–71), and read paragraph 16. Underline the words describing the sense of smell. How do you think this bit of sensory description helps readers imagine the scene?
Choose a place with noticeable, distinctive smells where you can stay for ten or fifteen minutes. You may choose an eating place (a cafeteria, a doughnut shop), a place where something is being manufactured (a sawmill, a bakery), or some other place that has strong, identifiable odors (a fishing dock, a garden, a locker room). While you are there, take notes on what you smell, and then write a page or so describing the place primarily through its smells.