Scents, Stinks and Stenches

June 14, 2009 – 9:11 pm

rose-yellowii

My student smiled and said, “Your odor is nice today.” She did not know that the word odor has a very negative meaning, like food rotting in a garbage can. Here are some words that always mean a bad smell:

Odor: There’s an odor inside the refrigerator. Maybe some food has gone bad.

Stink: A skunk sprays its enemy with a stinky fluid from inside its body to protect itself from attack.

Stench: The stench of garbage filled the alley.

Reeking: One woman at the party was reeking of cheap perfume.

Malodorous: The very strong perfume seemed malodorous to me.

Fumes: Sometimes the woman smelled fumes coming from the building’s furnace, because her apartment was located over the boiler room.

If I worked for a perfume company, however, I would not advertise our new line of stinks, stenches, and fumes! I would use some of the words which always mean a good smell. Full strength oil for sale this way is called perfume, and sometimes perfumes are very expensive. A diluted variety is called an eau de cologne, a usage which comes from the French language.

Here are some words for good smells:

Fragrance: This soap has the fragrance of roses.

Scent: Burning a candle scented with vanilla or cinnamon creates a nice atmosphere in your home.

Aroma: I like to be in the kitchen at dinnertime. I can smell the aroma of cooking food.

Other smell words are neutral.

Smell: The word smell itself is neutral. If I were a professor of biology or anatomy, I might tell you that the nerves in the human nose can detect the smell of smoke at a great distance.

Sniff: The man reached out his hand, and the dog sniffed it.

If you know one of these words, you can find the others easily in a standard reference work called a thesaurus. But you would need to look in a large dictionary of the English language to see sentences demonstrating how the words are used in real life. Electronic dictionaries often do not have this feature. But learning how words are used in actual practice is very important to gaining confidence in speaking English.

Some Idioms and Slang Expressions using the Smell Words

(1) “I smell a rat”: I suspect that someone is dishonest or that something evil or corrupt is going on.

(2) “That movie stinks”: That movie is extremely bad.

Some Questions for Discussion:

1. When my student noticed my nice perfume, what word should she have used instead of odor?

2. The smell of a rose is one of the most beloved of all fragrances. What other flowers have lovely fragrances?

3. What aromas do you enjoy in the kitchen? How about the aroma of baking bread?

4. Housewives are often in a battle with bad smells in their homes. For example, closets often smell of mildew, which is caused by dampness and not enough air circulation. If you install one small light bulb in a closet that smells of mildew, you can get rid of that bad smell. Do you know remedies for other bad smells in the home?

5. Do all flowers have fragrances?