Ejercicio 2 · Multiple choice cloze

On the difficulty of describing a smell

Of all the senses, smell is the one that language handles worst. English has a rich vocabulary for what things look like and a serviceable one for how they sound, but when it (1) to describing an odour, most speakers fall back on comparison: it smells like rain, like a hospital, like my grandmother house.

This is not a (2) of English in particular. Studies across dozens of languages have found the same pattern, with a handful of striking (3) . Speakers of certain languages of the Malay Peninsula have a set of abstract smell terms that behave much like colour words, and they use them with a (4) that European speakers cannot match.

What remains in (5) is why. One camp holds that the vocabulary follows the culture: where smell matters for hunting or for ritual, the words appear. Another argues that the causal arrow (6) the other way, and that having the words is what makes the distinctions available in the first place.

The debate has been (7) more heated than the evidence really warrants, which is often a sign that something else is at stake. In this case what is at stake is an old question, dressed in new clothes, about whether the limits of our language really do (8) the limits of our world.