Vocabulary for Taste And Smells

Factual Questions
1

My vocabulary isn’t really strong. If I were to describe the taste of the food I eat, I can only use some of these common description to describe: sweet, sour, bitter, sour and plain. If I were to describe in further details the taste of something i eat, i have to end up describing the texture of the food in my mouth to tell the difference. Are the tastes of the food we eat restricted only to this 5 descriptions? Or are there any words there which I haven’t heard of?

The second part of my question is with regards to smells. I cannot really describe a smell exactly. Perhaps fragrance and smelly, but this term depends on an individual’s perception. They are not really specific. The only term I learned, I guess was in chemical lab expt: pungent smell of ammonia. Are there any other words used to describe smells which I haven’t heard of?

2

Well, there is “umami” the meaty taste of certain amino acids. This word seems to be catching on gradually.

3

First, since taste and smell are closely intertwined, you cn probably substitute these words from list to list:

For taste: savory, bland, salty, tart, tangy, fermented, acrid, vinegary
For scent: musty, putrid, rancid, rotten, stale, stinking, strong, fetid, rank, balmy, gamy, foul, spoiled, coppery, heady, clean, fresh, sweet

You may find more with a thesaurus.

4

AceRegen, I don’t think this is actually a vocabulary problem. The hassle with describing sensory input is that not every set of taste buds, or whathaveyou, is identical. Add to that the fact that a person’s capability of tasting or smelling or hearing changes as they age, and the difficulty becomes clearer.

Let’s look at colors for a moment. I recall having the names for colors drilled into my head as a kid. “That is blue, this is red,” etc. Assuming no color blindness, these ‘definitions’ of colors suffice for most situations. I can recall one stupid argument I had with my wife over whether some color was more blue than red (or vice versa), which would be an example of where those definitions break down and aren’t really useful anymore, but that’s kind of extreme.

Anyway, I don’t remember any such “training” for smells or tastes. But, being able to accurately describe a smell or a taste to someone else depends on having a set of ‘definitions’ in common. The five basic tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami [try some MSG!]) are the most-basic ‘defintions’ one can come by, but even these vary from person to person (see this article, for example).

Anything more “complex” than those seem to me to be just describing combinations of the 5 basics. “Earthy” for example. “Chicken” is not a basic taste, but obviously lots of stuff tastes like it. These words are nothing more than an attempt to find some sort of common definition between two people on how something tastes.

So, perhaps it’s really not a vocabulary problem you’ve got, but rather that you’ve got yourself trapped into thinking that there must be some sort of absolute “taste word” for everything. Make it easy on yourself: if you think something tastes like chocolate that’s been wrapped in a sweat sock and then used to wipe an ashtray, say so. Most people will understand what you mean, even if they haven’t tasted the same chocolate or sweat socks or ashtrays that you have. Don’t go searching for some unique term to express this (although in this case, ‘crap’ might be an acceptable terse alternative) or other tastes.

Or smells. Much the same can be said of odors. “This smells like [insert comparison item(s) here]” is a perfectly accpetable method of describing aromas to others. Heck, I don’t know if there are even any “basic smells” corresponding to the five basic tastes.

But this brings to mind one thing which complicates the description of tastes, anyway: a lot of how things taste is directly ‘shaped’ by how those things smell going into your mouth (as Crunchy Frog rightly notes). Many of us can relate to just how bland and “cardboardy” things taste when we’ve got headcolds and can’t smell squat. A part of this experience can be had by stuffing wads of tissue up your nose before, say, a favorite meal is being cooked. This method isn’t perfect, since some of the smell will crawl up into your nose the “back way,” and I wouldn’t suggest stuffing anything deep enough into your nose to block everything (and don’t go trying to get sick to do it the ‘natural’ way, either).

[Slight hijack]By the way, your mentioning of the texture of foods immediately brought to mind Oliver Sacks’ discussion of ‘synesthesia’, or the confusion of senses. One case he describes that I remember fairly well is of a man who feels taste as shapes. If there’s not enough salt in a dish, for example, he’s likely to say, “this stew isn’t pointy enough.”[/hijack]

5

One imagines that there is a discrete set of basic smells corresponding to the set of different chemical receptor sites in our noses.

I’ve always thought that this question about smell taste vocabulary was really interesting in a “language defines our world” kind of way. I suspect that lack of common smell/taste descriptors tends to result in those senses being undervalued. I also suspect that the reason for the lack is the relative complexity of smell/taste.

Does anyone know of any actual research that has been done on this?

6

epolo wrote:

Well, I think that’s where part of the ‘problem’ in defining a basic set of smells lies - aromatic molecules can be really similar but have fairly distinct odors. We know how the taste buds do their different jobs, but I don’t think that there are such vastly different odor receptors in the nose. I have a feeling that the mechanism will be more like the one that people creating “electronic noses” are using: an array of detectors, which, when presented with different odors, excite many of the elements at once. In short, I think that if there is a true set of “basic smells,” there’ll be at least a couple dozen of them, if not hundreds.

Just now remembering the old standard “taste map” of the tongue (which was wrong, IIRC), the “sensory homoculus,” and plots of auditory response vs. frequency, and it occured to me that the spot in the nose where odors do their thing isn’t nearly as accessible to prying researchers. Isolating a few smell receptors isn’t nearly as easy as isolating taste buds. Perhaps that’s why we don’t know “the answer” already.

Quite the opposite, I think. The human sense of smell isn’t very good, for example, and no amount of extra words will make up for that. One would imagine that if there were a dog language on a par with human languages, it’d be riddled with smell vocabulary (and completely lacking in a color vocabulary, of course).

Then again, we’re such visual creatures that smells are often ignored unless they provoke a powerful response, deep down. Richard Feynman found that by just by paying close attention to scents we largely ignore, he could do a nifty “bloodhound” trick: get someone to pick a book off a shelf and handle it for a couple of minutes, then replace it. Come in, smell the books, and find the one that’d been handled, easily.

I keep meaning to try that out, myself…

7

Alan Watts once wrote an essay, “Do You Smell?”

He observed that while the English language has a verb to stink, it has no verb that means ‘to smell good’. I think his point was that most Americans haven’t really learned to appreciate their sense of smell. He suggested using incense.

8

I’ll see that hijack.

Anybody else remember the orange juice (?) commercial with the little kid who proclaimed “It’s rounder!”

9

Dave, don’t your objections about everyone having a different sense of taste and smell apply equally to sight and sound?

I always figured it was because humans don’t have all that much in the way of a sense of smell or taste. We sense the world primarily through sight and sound, so that’s where our culture and language has focused.

10

Actually, muttrox, I thought I’d been clear on that. No, I don’t think the same holds true for sight, especially, and hearing to a lesser extent.

Thought experiment (ignoring color for the moment): Look at something. Now describe it. Start big, and work your way down to the details. If you describe it sufficiently well, someone else ought to be able to figure out what you’re describing, without you having to name whatever it is, or even name parts of it (if you’re describing a door, then describe the doorknob - don’t say, “there’s a doorknob on it.”).

Second part of the experiment: I’ve never tasted chicken (honest). Without knowing what other foods I may or may not have tasted, describe the taste of chicken to me. In other words, saying, “it tastes like [some other food]” is the equivalent of saying, “there’s a doorknob on it.”

Now, color is trickier. There’s no “color measurer” in our heads that tells us, in anything close to absolute terms, the luminosity, saturation, or hue of a color. Yes, we can get this information using tools, but without those tools, we’re stuck saying “it’s green.” I cannot see (ha!) any way around this. Colors are all “doorknob”-type descriptions in this regard.

Dipping into solipsism and phenomenology for a moment, if I could borrow your eyes and visual cortex for a little while, what I perceive as blue, you could very well see as what I would call yellow. But, because you probably had the same hard training I did as a youngster, we both call those particular frequencies of light “blue.” I’m not talking about some weird form of color-blindness here, either. Perhaps some people are lousy dressers or decorators not because they can’t distinguish between two colors, but because they see colors that “go together” that few other people do. [/brain-twisting speculation]

Onto hearing… Actually, I may have to reverse my position on this, because now that I’m thinking about it in detail, describing sounds seems to me to be all doorknobs, as well. There just seem to be a heck of a lot of doorknobs available. Notations (sheet music, written languages), imitations (I used to be able to do a fair Peter Lorre), etc… Describing, say, the sound of a clarinet without resorting to doorknobs or the plot of its waveform (a technical doorknob) seems like a difficult job.

And as for “We sense the world primarily through sight and sound, so that’s where our culture and language has focused,” that was what I was trying to say in the last paragraphs of my last post. The opposite of epolo’s “language defines our world,” I think our world defines our language.

KneadToKnow: if I’ve seen such a commercial, I don’t remember it.

11

DaveW,

I didn’t read your posts close enough. I think we essentially agree on this.