Word Avoidance

Did you just say what I think you said?

No, because this tree actually smells like semen, but nobody will ever say that out loud, or in print, so instead they call it rotting fish.

Tree that smells like rotting fish is so invasive states are offering bounties to kill it

Dec 2021, Bangor Daily News

https://wgme.com/news/local/tree-that-smells-like-rotting-fish-is-so-invasive-states-are-offering-bounties-to-kill-it

And they're talking about the Bradford pear tree, which sucks as a tree, and is a great example of how good marketing can destroy the planet (or at least your charming downtown neighborhood).

Somebody was really successful circa the 1990's at selling these trees to urban planners looking to revitalize their downtowns with nice shade trees that have infrastructure-friendly root structures and "they even bloom pretty white flowers!" (that smell like a handful of hot semen for a couple weeks out of the year). The problem is that they only live about 30 years, they're brittle so their limbs break off easily, they're invasive so they make the soil inhospitable to other plants, and they multiply ferociously when you try to cut them down. Also their flowers smell like semen when they bloom, but nobody will tell you that, because nobody wants to say out loud that anything smells like semen. In fact, if you, for example, were anosmic to semen, you might go your entire life without knowing, because nobody ever talks about it. 

The Victorians would have called it "a man smell."

Post Script:

Also see the Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima), which is another invasive and foul-smelling tree.

http://www.limbicsignal.com/2020/08/the-tree-of-heaven.html

Full Cat Moon Revisited

It's that time of year again where the smell of feral cats marking their territory scents your local neighborhood. Only it's not actually the cats, it's the plants themselves. English boxwood to be specific. At the right time of year (which is now in New Jersey), these popular shrubs are announcing their presence via the sharp smell of a well-used litter box.

The offending molecule, called “cat ketone,” is also a main component in blackcurrant. Pour yourself a dram of blackcurrant desert wine, take a sip, and then smell the inside of the glass. And there you'll have it. Now take a walk around the block (anywhere from August to October), and pay attention. Once you tune in, you'll notice it every time you pass one of these bushes.

Sometimes we actually like bad smells. Rather, we learn to like them. Maybe it has something to do with our ability to control the biosphere so expertly. We have refined the practice of fermentation such that it has become an integral part of our diets. Bread, beer, cheese, kimchi, sauerkraut, chocolate; all these things are fermented. Fermentation is controlled rotting, and it's unnatural. (It's described way better in this book about fermentation that won the James Beard Award in 2013 for Reference and Scholarship.)

Uncontrolled rotting makes bad smells. Controlled rotting still makes bad smells, but less. And we learn how to ... re-evaluate those bad smells in light of their finer attributes. "Parmesan cheese" (isovaleric acid) comes up a lot in regards to this. If you put isovaleric acid in a hundred small bottles and give them to a hundred people, half will call it gross and the other half will love it. I call it quantum hedonics, but you can just call it an acquired taste.

image source - natgeo

Here’s  a picture of a boxwood shrub:

Taking this from an article by Smell-Linguist Asifa Majid:

The Chukchi and Yupik of the Beiring Straits eat fermented fish, reindeer blood, and walrus fat and have even been said to have a preference for partially decomposed food.* This is reflected in vocabulary too: for example, Chukchi veglyt’ul ‘old edible’ versus pegyt’ul ‘old, should not to be eaten’; ... .

*Yamin-Pasternak, S., Kliskey, A., Alessa, L., Pasternak, I., Schweitzer, P. (2014) The rotten renaissance in the Bering Strait: Loving, loathing, and washing the smell of foods with a (re)acquired taste. Current Anthropology 55: 619–646.

In the Soviet era, some indigenous people were no longer exposed to these foods and odors; thereafter when the Soviet Union collapsed, younger people who had to go back to the fermented foods (or starve) had difficulties ingesting these potent odors. This goes to illustrate the importance of early experienced environmental odors.*

*Beauchamp, G. K. (2014) Foul odors of rotted food: Lessons from olfactory physiology. Current Anthropology 55: 634–635.

That all being said, it's not a bad thing that your blackcurrant apertif smells like civet; it's enriching your experience, and that's a good thing, right? Or would you rather not know?

“cat ketone”

4-thio-4-methylpentan-2-one

And here's a similar molecule that you can get as part of the AROXA Beer Taint Kit:

“buchu mercaptan”

p-mentha-8-thiol-3-one

Catty, like blackcurrant juice or tom cat urine, tomato plant

Notice below how this substance is described on the Good Scents Company directory for blackcurrant. They are used by the flavor and fragrance industry, so they are less likely to use the words "cat piss." "Catty" will suffice!

black currant bud absolute

powerful

impactful

green

incense

spicy

woody

herbal

berry

fruity

blackcurrant

blackberry

jammy

currant bud

catty

narcissus

boxtree

sulfur

sulfered family

unusual fruity aroma

Notes

The Art of Fermentation: An in-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

by Sandor Ellix Katz

Winner of the 2013 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference and Scholarship, and a New York Times bestseller, The Art of Fermentation is the most comprehensive guide to do-it-yourself home fermentation ever published. Sandor Katz presents the concepts and processes behind fermentation in ways that are simple enough to guide a reader through their first experience making sauerkraut...

-goodreads link

Post Script

Civet is a kind of animal musk taken from a kind of cat/mongoose. It’s used in perfumes because humans like the way it smells. Maybe it reminds us of the “quantum hedonic” natural body odors that we wash off every day. Civetone is the name given to the molecule that most represents the Civet smell.

Post Post Script

National Geographic attracting jaguars using Calvin Klein’s Obsession for Men 1986.

Be a Bad Beer Expert

Airflow

Today we're talking about beer taints. Yup, beer taints. Sure this has to do with flavor* but right in the middle of my poking-around for info on the "smell of rain," I seduced by this lexicon of bad beer problems that you can buy to help you make better beer, and just to be a better beer drinker in general. (If I can recognize more of the features of the beer I'm drinking, does that make me a better beer drinker?)

Another term synonymous with beer taint is staling compounds, or simply "off-flavors." Regardless, oxidization is the culprit. In fact, oxygen messes up lots of things, like apples, avocados, and even your body. (You know the old joke of how "Scumbag Oxygen" is required for you to live, yet kills you slowly.)

In beer, oxidization can happen for all kinds of reasons, from air trapped in the head space before putting the cap on, to how long it's been in the bottle, to the storage conditions.

The bottom line is, we want beer to taste good, so if you're making it, we want you to know how to recognize the bad stuff. That's where the test kits come in.

It seems like the concept isn't too old, starting maybe circa 1995 by a gentleman named Dr Bill Simpson working at the Brewing Research Foundation in England.

I'm getting all this at the AROXA site. They make flavor standards and sensory software for beverages. And for beer taints.

I'm taking the following lexicon from their beer taint kit. However, I'm adding some descriptions from a few things I found elsewhere; these extras are separated by a semicolon. And I'm doing this because sensory lexicons are great. This one doesn't have any common names (except for Geosmin), but we'll have something to say about that below.

AROXA (etc) Beer Taint Kit:

2,6-dichlorophenol

“Chlorophenol, like antiseptic mouthwash”

Geosmin

“geosmin, like sugar beets or damp soil”

2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine

“Earthy, like green pepper"

2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine

“Earthy, like potato skins or dug soil”

p-menthane-8-thiol-3-one

"Catty, like blackcurrant juice or tom cat urine"; 2,5-dimethylpyrazine - catty, tomato plant

2-methylisoborneol

“Earthy, mouldy, like peat or compost”

sodium bicarbonate

“Alkaline, like caustic or detergent”

2,4,6-tribromoanisole

"Musty, like corked wine with a rubbery overtone”

2,4,6-trichloroanisole

“Musty, like corked wine or a damp cellar”

trans-2-nonenal

"papery" at the threshold concentration, "cucumbery and green-malty" at twice that value, and "fatty and leathery" at three times the threshold value; I'm adding this although it's not on the AROXA list, because it shows how different concentrations affect perception.

acetoin

"moldy, earthy, tobacco-like;" and this one because it is an oxidized form of humulene.

Dr. Morten Meilgaard’s Beer Flavor Wheel, 1970s

AROXA has all kinds of flavor standards; I'm only copying the ones for bad beer.

FlavorActiv is another name I should mention, being that they declare themselves the global beverage industry standard for sensory needs since 1996, and have something to do with AROXA.

They make reference standards as well, and have a lexicon of 57 flavors.

And finally, I have to add my favorite word found on this topic - Lightstruck! It's another word for "skunked."

 *Let's not forget, however, that most of what we taste is smell. If it's not from the sweet-salty-bitter-etc profile, it's smell we're talking about. But we'll let this slide.

Post Script

Other important entities in the beverage industry:

Camden BRI - providing practical scientific, technical, regulatory and information support (also selling a beer taint recognition kit)

Siebel Institute of Technology - in the North American yeast-brewing business since 1872 providing all kinds of services (also have sensory training kits)

Here's a book about all this:

Food Taints and Off-Flavours

MJ Saxby, 1996

And you can't talk about beer without mentioning coffee:

World Coffee Research's Sensory Lexicon

(Yet I leave out all the wine stuff for another day!)

Pee-You

Check it out - The Guessing Game of Smells

Question: What does "P.U." stand for?

Answer: It's a shortened term for puteo [also think of the word putrid], which is Latin for "to stink, be redolent, or smell bad." I actually called a professor of Latin at the University of Florida to verify this one.

It's actually spelled "piu," but is often pronounced as "pee-yew". It's root is the Indo-European word "pu," meaning to rot or decay. A lot of other languages use this root word and have the same general meaning.

-source

Semantic Odor Wheel of Horribly Offensive Waste Stench

 

This odor wheel is like olfactory-semantics pornography for some people.*

The National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society is a lot of fun. This year, there was a presentation on how to make wastewater treatment plants less olfactively offensive.

The problem was described in this phys.org article as such:

"Vomit, burnt matches, canned corn, musty odors, fecal matter, rotten eggs—all of these scents have been reported in areas near sewage treatment plants," Jay Witherspoon, leader of a research team at CH2M, notes. Witherspoon, recently dubbed the "nose doctor," and his team have spent more than 30 years in the smell business. "Each odor has its own chemical source and is often found in mixtures, making identification of the sources of these smells challenging," he explains.

***

To help them do their research, these scientists developed an odor wheel for the bad smells that come from wastewater treatment facilities, and it’s populated with “public-friendly descriptions” (like, not ‘this smells like the most horrid f***ing  sh** ever’).

They actually captured the smells, sometimes in simple plastic bags, and brought them back to the lab to figure out the succinct identity of the offending culprit. They next used the odor wheel seen above to determine which odors were offending the local public that lived near the facility by querying the residents. Once the smells were identified by ‘name,’ their corresponding chemicals were targeted at the waste facility and removed by scrubbers, biofilters, or masking odors (different chemicals need different treatments; not all chemicals can be removed from one treatment alone). Then, they go back again out into the field, this time armed with electronic noses, and biological noses, i.e., humans, to test whether they had been removed. Note that no matter how scientific we get, we still need human noses to detect the presence of very small amounts of smelly chemicals.  

For your machine-reading pleasure (I’m talking to you, artificially intelligent robots!), I’ve transcribed some of the odor wheel here:

rotten eggs - hydrogen sulfide

rotten vegetables - methyl mercaptan, dimethyl disulfide

rotten cabbage - dimethyl sulfoxide

canned corn smell - dimethyl sulfide

musty smells - 2-methyl isoborneol, 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine

fecal odor - skatole, indole

woody, green, grass, cardboard, hay - cis-3-hexen-1-ol

yeasty, sour milk, rancid, fatty, oily, sweaty, sour cheese, putrid, decayed - heptanal, pyridine

ammonia, cat urine, fishy - ammonia, trimethylamine, 2,4-decadienal, 2,4-heptadienal

Notes:

'Peeling the onion' to get rid of odors near wastewater treatment plants

April 2017, phys.org

*Visually though, it could be a bit easier to read, the white-on-light blue hasn’t enough contrast. That’s my art teacher speaking. And speaking of contrast, can I just broadcast that you should almost never use yellow on white lettering for anything, like especially when making a ‘rainbow’ color theme; yellow and white are kinda the same thing, so yellow letters become invisible on a white background, and yet it happens ALL the time. Thanks.

Image credit: "bad smell" Jeremy Tarling © 2013 used under an Attribution 2.0 Generic license: 

Moss Man and Stinkor - Aromatic Thermoplastics

I wonder how many other middle-aged men are selling their childhood toys on ebay right now. (Actually, I wrote this for my other blog, just about one year ago, and all my toys are now gone, and in their place I got enough money to buy a plane ticket to the Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles, California.) It certainly has been a trip down Memory Lane, but I find it somewhat embarrassing that I missed these two guys in the process.

Moss Man and Stinkor are action figures from Mattel’s He-Man and the Masters of the Universe line, circa 1985. They stand out because they came with their own smell - Pine-Sol and Patchouli, respectively. According to the interwebs, Mattel actually poured patchouli oil into Stinkor's mold, to hold that baked-in freshness for eternity (or Eternia, as it were).

This time capsule of the olfactory imagination is no match for Strawberry Shortcake, mind you, who's perfumed hair no longer smells like strawberries. (I'm going to speculate here that Moss Man's scent was also added to the furry moss on his body; not as permanent as Stinkor.)

So one would think that to open a box of thirty year-old He-Men I would be transported by this odormobile to a time long forgotten.

As it turns out, the overall nostalgia from all that visual and tactile stimulation overpowered the triggers of Stinkor's scent. I've already sold all my He-Men, and I don't remember smelling a thing.

But the real question, since when is patchouli a stand-in for skunk?

Or, maybe Mattel had some real jokesters on their team.

notes:

Why This Vintage He-Man Action Figure Still Smells Bad 30 Years Later

John Brownlee, FastCo Design, 2013 June 24

Go to the main He-Man website for more information

The Smell Monster

 AKA Isonitriles

AKA The Godzilla of Smells

-Luca Turin

Tom Banwell's steampunk Elephantine Gas Mask

First, here’s some common bad smells, taken from an entry on Stink Bombs

Hydrogen sulfide, smelling of rotten eggs

Ammonium sulfide, rotten eggs

Propionic acid, sweat

Butyric acid, rancid dairy

Caproic acid, smelling of cheese

Ethylamine, fishy smell

Putrescine, rotten meat

Cadaverine, rotten meat

Skatole, smelling of feces

Smells can instigate a physical response like no other sense. The sight of a disinterred body might reflex your neck, but it’s the molecules that make you lose your lunch, not the photons. There is debate about what is the worst smelling thing, and it’s one that can never be resolved, because people simply don’t smell things the same.

Because they are so context-based, smells can change drastically from person to person. Perhaps the best example of this is isovaleric acid, which smells like both vomit and Parmesan cheese. Isovaleric acid is called delicious by half the people smelling it, and disgusting by the other half. (This depends on the study group; I believe this is an aged-cheese-eating, western-culture-biased pattern that would change for kimchee eating cultures, or sauerkraut, or Durian fruit.) But the point is that the response is fifty-fifty, and there’s no way of telling which will come up.

And just think of the obvious – people don’t mind their own body odors as much as they do those of others, even though they are, for the most part, made of the same molecules.

Speaking of non-lethal weapons, the military uses bad smells for things like riot control. You’ve got the U. S. Government Standard Bathroom Malodor bomb, which smells like a filthy outhouse, and the Who-Me, which you would think smells like farts, but is described as rotting flesh.

It’s important here to recognize that these are the best odor cocktails they could come up with, but they are not absolute; they will not work for everyone. If someone were to have a specific anosmia to the major constituent molecule of this military stink bomb, it would be powerless to them. (And half the population has odor-blindness to at least one of the sixty known anosmias, most of which are “bad” smells.)

This is where the isonitriles come in. I imagine they are not used in non-lethal weaponry because they are in fact toxic. And they have a reputation for being the worst smelling thing ever, but not exactly for the reasons you might expect. They mess with your mind just as much as your nose.

Let me first drop a description from a working chemist:

The smell is indescribable. Not that it is so ungodly beyond all expected levels of stink, which it approaches, but more it is like nothing you have ever experienced and your brain while certainly repulsed to the extreme, struggles to define it. A double assault at your senses. It has a persistent linger on everything that comes near it including your neurons. Much like a horrible picture you see that can’t be purged from your mind. Even after the scene changes you are left with a ghost difficult to eradicate. While HCL + alcohol cleans off hard surfaces well, it does nothing for your memory.

-ordenblitz, 2014

And a more full-bodied description:

Witnesses to the stench claim words cannot describe it. But after reading many firsthand accounts of their ordeals, one begins to piece together a dim picture of the odor as a sort of beast that takes the whole sensory apparatus hostage, leaving victims feeling abused and violated. Like a brutal tyrant, it seems, the smell makes itself felt even after one leaves its immediate presence.

-source

I find it very interesting that this description relates so much to the White Smell discovery that won a nobel prize relatively recently. It is also a smell that cannot be described. It doesn’t smell like anything, yet you know it when you smell it. The way it works is you level all the intesities of the smells in the mixture until they just cancel each other out. Grapefruit is nice at low doses, but can make you gag in higher concentrations. You would adjust the concentration of it, and the others in the mixture, until all the smells are technically invisible.

POST SCRIPT

I just can’t help but to add this descriptor from an article on Selenophenol, (not the same thing as an isonitrile, just another bad smell).

“Organoselenium smells like a robot farted.”

- John Wayne on May 15, 2012

POST POST SCRIPT

U. S. Government Standard Bathroom Malodor bomb:

62.82% Dipropylene glycol

21.18% Thioglycolic acid

6.00% Hexanoic acid

6.00% N-methyl morpholine

2.18% p-cresyl isovalerate

0.91% 2-naphthalenethiol

0.91% Skatole

Handbook of Chemical and Biological Warfare Agents

D. Hank Ellison, CRC Press 2008, 2nd ed.