"The Uneducated Nose"

"When it comes to the vocabulary of sense, in bodice rippers and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, smell is at a significant disadvantage; nonspecificity is commonplace. A recent paper in the journal Cognition, for instance, quipped that if people were as bad at naming sights as they are at naming scents, “they would be diagnosed as aphasic and sent for medical help.” The paper quoted scattershot attempts by participants in a previous study to label the smell of lemon: “air freshener,” “bathroom freshener,” “magic marker,” “candy,” “lemon-fresh Pledge,” “some kind of fruit.” This sort of difficulty seems to have very little to do, however, with the nose’s actual capabilities...
difficulty with talking about smell is not universal... In one analysis, Majid and her colleague Niclas Burenhult found that speakers of Jahai were as good at classifying scratch-and-sniff cards as they were at classifying color chips; their English-speaking counterparts, meanwhile, tended to give meandering and disparate descriptions of scents...
In English, smells are often described in terms of the things that emit them (“chocolaty”) rather than in terms of their inherent, abstract qualities (“musty”). In Jahai, however, there are about a dozen abstract words in common use for distinct scents, such as the one that emanates from stale rice, mushrooms, cooked cabbage, and certain species of hornbill (yes, the bird)."
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/naming-scents-uneducated-nose

(credit to JL)