Not my idiom (now, with no coconuts!).

[mrissa]

It is a silly thing, but it frustrates me over and over again: I just don't know of socially acceptable modes to say what I'm actually perceiving. If you come across someone you haven't seen in a long time, and you are inquiring after their travel, and you say, "How are you? You look good," there is a way to intone that so that your impression of the other person's sexual attractiveness is not at issue. You can also intone it so that it is that kind of compliment, but there is a way to say it so it doesn't come out that way. You can also say to someone who has been sick, "Are you feeling better? Your color is better."

But that's not what I'm perceiving. What I mean is, "It's good to smell you again," and "How are you? You smell good," and, "Are you feeling better? Your sweat is better." Especially that last. Sweat is on the list of things we are Not To Notice, apparently.

And you can say, "Oh, it's good to finally match a name with a face!" But if you say, "Oh, it's good to finally match a name with a smell!", things will become very swiftly alarming from that point. Possibly for both of you.

And if you say to your friend, "It was nice to meet your sweetie in person, and I can kind of smell what you smell in him/her," that's not good either. Even though if you said, "I can see what you see in him/her," no one would assume that you meant, "I have noticed the visual appeal of your sweetheart but no other, non-visual traits." "I see why you want to go out with him/her," comes out very different from, "I smell why."

All the ways I can think of to say this in English end up sounding like they are comments either on attractiveness in more detail than people expect to hear it in non-romantic relationships or else on basic hygiene standards. Switching from "you smell good" to "you smell all right" makes people feel like a packet of lunchmeat or a gallon of milk: "Has so-and-so gone south?" "Give her here. Nope, smells all right to me."

It's a different data set, is the thing. One misses things the other catches, and vice versa. And I'm sure there are things my eyes are technically catching that my brain is not processing consciously, just as there are probably things many people smell that they're not processing consciously. But having some sense of which is which seems like it might be useful. Reporting in that I see something I don't see at all seems perilous.

It seems that as people get to know me better, I can say more of this kind of thing and they will be used to it more. So this is a good trend. I am less careful than I was about trying to hide smelling things. I have reassured a number of people that a fair amount of what I smell is neutral to me, that it's not a bad thing to smell a moderate amount of what someone had for dinner or that they are a little stressed. I am still somewhat careful when it comes to attractive members of the opposite sex, though, and as I am geek-oriented, this comes up a lot in the social settings I'm most likely to be in.

I'm pretty sure some of you are as sound-oriented as I am smell-oriented: do you have this trouble at all?

(Now markgritter has been up and down most of the night being sick.

All right, autumn! You win! Uncle! Aunt! Whatever other relative you want me to say! Just cut out this petty bullshit! This is insult to a pile of further insult and injury mingled.

I would like to go kick something now.

I have been going around telling people I am going to spend November eating bonbons and reading movie magazines. I started inviting people to join me. In some cases I may even provide the bonbons.)

Comments

[warinbear.livejournal.com]

All the ways I can think of to say this in English end up sounding like they are comments either on attractiveness in more detail than people expect to hear it in non-romantic relationships or else on basic hygiene standards.

Yes, English stinks. <g,d,&r>

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

GROAN!

But see, that's my point: we're much better at saying things smell unpleasant than that they smell reassuring or positive. "I smell a rat," and, "there's something fishy about this," and so on.

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

Alas, I've no insights to offer on the hypersensory front (having the opposite problem, if anything -- everything's *clogged* right now), but I'm with you on the bonbons and magazines. I'll bring bourbon balls or lime tarts or summat 'long those lines...

a somewhat geeky reply

[redbird]

That most of us haven't noticed that lack of sensory terminology, and the way the expectations shift, is probably self-reinforcing.

I see discussions of people's dominant senses, and it's generally sight/hearing/touch, often with a note that touch dominance is rare. (ozarque talks about this in terms of matching people's dominant sense in talking to them.) I don't know if there are even fewer people for whom smell is dominant than for whom touch is, or whether the numbers are similar but the expectations you describe make it less talked about.

Different data sets, definitely.

Reporting in that I see something I don't see at all seems perilous. Maybe something like "I get it" or "I'd noticed that," which don't explicitly invoke any sense, for things you're getting from smell if you don't want to startle people with how you're collecting data.

Re: a somewhat geeky reply

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think I recall someone in a discussion on ozarque's journal -- don't remember if it was her, so I don't want to ascribe a viewpoint to her that might not be accurate -- who was being pretty dismissive of the idea of getting data through smell. Which was frustrating to me.

orientation

[aet.livejournal.com]

Strangely enough even the visually oriented can easily get into trouble when they are not face oriented (I mean, what would you assume if I would tell you all the things that I remember about Columbine's belly? Of course she had only to stretch herself once for me to notice both how the hair grow on her belly and the way the scar was not as I had expected it to be ...). So I usually have to edit my visual experiences to fit the canon also.

Not to mention that too often I fail to pay attention to face and so am unable to recognize people when I can see only face (a random example of apology that would probably get strange reaction: "I was not ignoring you, you just walked past me with your hands in pockets, of course I failed to recognize you!")

Re: orientation

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Faceblindness is an extreme of this tendency; not sure if it applies here. But I do know what you mean, recognizing people by how they swing their arms or hold their shoulders rather than by how they look. I was able to recognize my friend Andrew from the way he moved from the knees down once when I was looking out a basement window. I would never have known his shoes and pants if he'd been holding still. (So if I was Skade, no problem! Just make them move! But I'd never have gone for Baldr anyway. "The Beautiful," bah. *YAWWWWWN*)

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I really like hearing how your brain works and how you perceive the world. It's very different from how I do, but I couldn't nail down how I interpret people the way you have. When in doubt, I use 'seem', which isn't perfect-- she seems nice, but wait 'til she gets mad-- but it's something.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I do have "seems," and "can't say why I feel that way." But a lot of it is identifiable as smell. eileenlufkin, for example, got filed in "good people I should trust" pretty much instantaneously, and I'm pretty sure it was pheromonal. She has since behaved like a Good People I Should Trust, and I've heard stories from other people that reinforce that impression. But first impressions rely a lot on smell for me.

Sometimes this is very scary, when I trust someone more quickly than I can rationally justify. So far the people I have trusted that quickly have a better track record than the people I distrusted and tried to talk myself into trusting, though.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

You could always go the Native Tongue route and use 'perceive' instead.

Or perhaps not.

Oddly, since I'm part of the seething throng that is vision-primary (although my sense of smell seems to have burgeoned in the past few years, which is fascinating me), I've thought about all this and been annoyed by it too. Probably not with as much feeling as you.

I think it's interesting and very nice that a lot of scents are neutral to you. The other person I know with a very acute sense of smell seems to more frequently feel assaulted by the world, though not specifically about people, except in the cases of cigarette smoke or perfume.

I think it's strange that...now, is it our species or our culture which is so much more strongly oriented to sight than to other senses? In any case, I find it a little weird because scent has been found to be the sense that's generally hooked into memory most strongly and directly. Considering that piece of wiring, I'd somehow expect it to have more prominence in other contexts, as well.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Cigarette smoke itself is not my favorite smell (nor, come to that, is pot smoke), but some smokers have a blend of tobacco with other body chemistry or external sources of scent that comes out rather pleasant in my nose. Rare but possible; hugged one such yesterday, and was around a few others who didn't actively smell nice to me but also didn't offend my nostrils. When one of my favorite great-aunt and -uncle pairs quit smoking, I was glad for them but very confused and disoriented to be around them.

I don't like the bases most perfume companies use, although some essential oil bases go awry in different directions, so it's not a generalized solution. But on some people, perfume bases or essential oil bases I don't like in isolation can be fine.

I have felt assaulted by my scent environment, but usually it takes an extreme case, and it's more common with something like illness. And not just a cold or low-grade sinus infection, either -- mostly stuff like kidney failure. I can deal with it, but it's hard.

[redbird]

It's not just our species: it's apes and Old World monkeys. We have better color vision than most other mammals (though there are non-mammalian species that do as well or better than humans), and have lost a lot of genes for detecting odor, compared to other mammals. (The no-longer-functional remnants of the genes are still in our DNA, in many cases.)

As a side note to that, the honeybee genome has just been sequenced, and one thing that the researchers found is that they have many more genes for smell, and fewer for taste, than fruit flies. The article I saw suggested that this is because they're doing a lot of scent-based communication, and possibly detecting specific flowers at the right time to gather nectar and pollen (hence lots of smell genes) and that their foods aren't likely to spoil, so there's less pressure to retain taste genes.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I have very little smell perception of other people, so I can only imagine how this is for you, but I think I can imagine it from your description.

Feel free to comment on my smell, should you be inclined to.

I find that people frequently say to me, "You look tired" when I'm not. I have this nearing-60 baggy-eyes thing going on, plus the natural darkish undereyes I have had all my life. (Though I'm tempted to reply, "I'm almost 60 and I've raised two kids and am still working on two others--of course I'm tired"--but it wouldn't be true.) So I'd actually be interested in whether you ever perceive me as "smelling tired"--although we may not have had enough interaction for you to recognize such.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Likewise, on the dark undereyes. A character I played once led a friend to comment that I had a "natural ability to look tragic and haggard," to which I said, gee, thanks. I mean, it's useful when the character's supposed to look tragic and haggard, but it's remarkably difficult for me to look like I've gotten a full night of sleep, even when I have. (Any good solutions that take me less time than makeup, I'd love to hear them.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You haven't generally smelled tired when I've been around you. Maybe on a Sunday morning at Minicon a bit more tired than at other times. But not as a general trait.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Makes me think of somewhat unusual ways to phrase common requests -- "Hey, I've just finished this manuscript, could you take a quick sniff at it and tell me what you think?" That one would even make sense to most people, perhaps after a second of processing, I think. (Or, in Dog, "Please sniff the ass of this story and tell me what you think.")

English seems to treat good smells and tastes as at least borderline sexual. Let's say 'sensual', not invoking the generic "sense data" meaning. While you can give a visual description that leans strongly that way, you can *also* give a very positive visual description that doesn't. But when people describe fine wine, coffee, food, chocolate, and such, there's always some kind of an edge of sexuality being invoked, seems like. Not much, not necessarily terribly direct (one can deliberately choose to go completely ove the top with it, but that's another issue). But it seems like it's always there.

Or maybe that's just me.

If it's not just me, that partly explains why good smell terminology for people is a bit fraught.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That first example is a good one in some ways -- clear meaning and all -- but mostly people actually do literally look at a manuscript in order to read it, so I'm less bothered by that one in specific. (I do smell letters I get through the mail, though.)

My aunt sent a birthday card to my father that had the caption "Dog Security Guards." Two dogs at a security checkpoint, and one was saying to the other, "I understand that you probably are who you say you are, but the regulations demand that I sniff your butt anyway." The thing I love about my aunt is that she is so refined and proper.

But yes, I don't think it's just you in perceiving a lot of scent-description as sensual, borderline sexual. And some scent stuff can be that way, of course (at least "of course" from where I sit) -- but not all, and not as much as seems to come out that way.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think these are perceptions that most people are just not going to understand. Most people do not have much conscious awareness of smells and are going to jump to strange conclusions if you talk about how they smell different from last time, etc. Most people don't take those "see" and "sound" comments too literally, so if you are pleased to be in someone's presence because they smell nice, it seems good enough to say "You look good," or "I'm happy to see you," even though you mean "You smell good" and "I'm happy to smell you."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And I do, I do say, "Good to see you." I say, "I see your point." But sometimes it bugs me when it's specifically smell stuff rather than general perception.

[lutin.livejournal.com]

Hasn't Shweta tried to talk to you about CogLing? ;)

One answer to your musings, anyway, is to look at English's metaphors. Understanding is Seeing is a really, really old one which goes back to Proto Indo-European, and which is still productive+ in English. (I see what you mean, I can't make heads or tails of it, etc.) So when you're noticing something in English, that metaphor & it's expressions basically trump the others.

(Also, as you or someone else pointed out, smell is a lot more personal than look.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think Shweta's e-mail time has probably been too limited to go into pet theory much.

I think I would point out less that smell is a lot more personal than look and more that smell is interpreted as a lot more personal than look. I cannot avoid smelling people when I meet them. I can glance away and take in a lot less visual detail than I can scent detail.

But the Proto Indo-European bit: you're suggesting that this is a common skew in that entire language family? Interesting; I was only saying "English" because I don't know as much about other languages in idiomatic detail. I wonder how the skew works in Finnish.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

Being auditory/kinesthetic over visual every time, I find that if I think about vision-related words as socially lubricating metaphors, it works best for me. To the point that I say those really ridiculous things like "I see what you're saying," when in fact, no, really, I don't. Such things are supposed to be the sign of a highly visual person, but it's not, it's just me, overcompensating for my extremely non-visual way of looking at the world.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

The person I knew who used "see" most often was blind.

[rosefox]

I notice the difference in my sweat when I'm sick. Why shouldn't others? I've often wanted to say something like "Are you feeling better? You smell better", but I can only say that to sinboy.

Western culture has been anti-body-smell for thousands of years, whether by perfume alone or by bathing and perfume together. I can't stand it. I'm not as sensitive as you are, by a long shot, but smell matters a great deal to me--I'm more likely to get memory flashbacks from smells than I am from just about anything except maybe specific songs, which is different from sound in general--and one of the ways I determine whether someone is a good person for me to get to know is by smell. Strong perfumes smell like... well, like falsehood, basically. They're a barrier to knowing important things about people. I can't stand them (in addition to them making my eyes itch).

I am sufficiently sound-oriented that I'll also say things like "You sound better" and mean it in an aspects-of-vocalization way. When my brother went on antidepressants, I exclaimed, "You got your inflections back!" This sort of observation seems much more socially acceptable, though. It's much less involuntary, so commenting on it is not so intrusive. I think some people dislike comments on the way they smell in part because it's not conscious. You're supposed to comment on things people do voluntarily, like how they cut their hair, and not on things the body does on its own, like balding. When you intend one and it's the other--as when you compliment someone on slimming down and they explain that it's because they have cancer--it's embarrassing. The primary ways people have to affect their smells are washing and perfuming, so it's acceptable to say "You smell nice and clean" or "That's a lovely scent". "You smell much sweeter since you went vegetarian" would be borderline; vegetarianism is a voluntary behavior, but it probably wasn't undertaken with the idea of changing one's olfactory signature.

So anyway, I can't help you on using smell-words with people who don't make much use of smell or who aren't very smell-sensitive, but you're more than welcome to do so with and around me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

A happy part of my smell-sensitivity is that perfume doesn't interfere much. For me it's like wearing a brightly colored or patterned shirt: some of them may be eye-searing colors, but they don't cover the face, generally. Of course it's conceivable that a perfume could become more like a burqa -- or like one of those headache-inducing optical illusion garments, where I still could see the face but didn't really want to look at the person. But mostly it doesn't work that way for me. It's a layer of smell -- for me, it's about equivalent to how people choose clothing. Some people choose clothing to make specific statements about themselves, and I can like or dislike those statements or how they fit with the person, but other people have a much more utilitarian approach to bodily coverings, and that's fine, too.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I'm largely kinesthetic, secondarily kinesthetic+tactile. I can remember how it felt to move around in places where I've lived better than how they looked. If I don't quite remember how a word is spelled, I start writing it and see what feels right. And I remember things better when I write them down -- even if I never look at what I've written.

One complication is that sometimes I see (and/or otherwise perceive) patterns whose details I can't easily pick apart. For example "He looks married." Or the similarity in facial expressions of some Fundamentalists and some people raised as Marxist-Leninists.

Another complication is synesthesia of several kinds.

Note that some people have no sensory memories at all. Which is probably why some amateur sex stories describe participants almost entirely in terms of body measurements, plus hair color. I suspect most of the people who do this would be astonished if anyone asked "Yes, but what do they look like?"

[mkille.livejournal.com]

This is how it is for me too.

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

I don't have nearly as strong a sense of smell as you do, but I notice those things at times, as well as the texture of people's skin and they way they hold themselves, and there really aren't ways of explaining that to someone else, either. If it's any comfort, if and when we meet, saying something like that would make perfect sense to me.

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I didn't realize people weren't supposed to recognize smells for a long time after most folks learn to stop talking about the smells they recognize. =/ Feel free to comment in smell-o-vision regarding any observations you may have about me when we interact in person. I always assume you're doing it in your head anyway, and I've never understood why people are so unsettled by the whole scent recognition thing. Doesn't EVERYONE, non-scent-oriented folks included, recognize certain changes in smell? I think they do but just redirect it to some other sense for confirmation. For example, when I walk into a house when someone is sick, I instantly smell sickness. Not vomit; that's a different smell, though it may be a component of "sick." But just "someone here doesn't smell right, and the only way to describe it is 'sick.'" And different illnesses smell different to me, but I've had lots of experience smelling a broad selection of illnesses, so I could understand if others couldn't necessarily differentiate cancer-sick from head-cold-sick. But still, maybe people who are more visually oriented would go in and notice in the back of their mind that it smells sick and automatically, unconsciously start looking around the room for a box of tissues, bottles of cold remedies, and other trappings to reassure them that their nose was correct, but I think they'd still have smelled it first. Then again, I'm smell oriented, so maybe my view is just skewed.

Jason and I sometimes war with each other about whether the kids are sick because I can tell one of them has what I call "fever" but I suppose would more properly be distinguished as "some febrile illness coming on, causing their body chemistry to be wonky" and he (being so concrete and objective) will take their temp and say no, they're fine, and we go back and forth about it, as I remain adamant that the child is indeed sick despite what the damn thermometer says. It wasn't until I read what you wrote in a comment above about smelling the change in body chemistry that I realized that that's what I was doing, and I just was unable to put it into words he'd understand. Next time, I'll point him to what you said and just say "trust me." :-P

[aet.livejournal.com]

"Doesn't EVERYONE, non-scent-oriented folks included, recognize certain changes in smell?"

I guess the easiest way to make you understand your mistake is to remind you how many people around you have to use glasses or hearing aids. Just as many people have trouble with sense of smell, only it seems to be kind of not entirely straightforward - some people lose sense of some, but not all smells and some people regain some sense of smell temporarily when, for example, their sinus problems are under control.

And when I myself sometimes lose and sometimes regain, at least I have memory of what smells. I was totally baffled/impressed to read a young woman write on a net forum: "I must confess I am one of those people who has used nail polish remover on a plane. I was just not aware that it has any smell at all."

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I suspect the reason that discussing smells so often comes off as sexual is largely because a lot of us can't really smell other people (well, most other people) until we're right up against them.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Do you think that accounts for the sexualizing of language relating to food and drink as well?

[naomikritzer]

I was thinking about this earlier, and had sort of the same thought as dichroic -- that this makes people twitchy in part because most of us are aware of the smell of the people we are extremely intimate with (significant others, our own kids) but no one else's. We tend to assume it goes the other way, and it's disconcerting when it doesn't.

Your sense of smell sounds extraordinarily dog-like (and I mean that in a good way -- comparing people to canines is another one of those things that can be taken in exactly the wrong way). I would love to know what trustworthiness smells like.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I can tell you what it smells like, because it smells like its own thing. But what it feels like is when you were little and just knew that you could climb up on someone's lap or take their hand and they would be nice grown-ups. And it also feels like looking down at a four-year-old who has just taken your hand and beamed confidently up at you. It feels like both sides at once, all inside your nose.