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I came home one day recently and, for reasons I don’t quite understand, my living room smelled like ...
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I came home one day recently and, for reasons I don’t quite understand, my living room smelled like my grandmother’s house. Suddenly I felt as if I were 12 years old, happy and relaxed, sitting in her kitchen. I can remember what her house looked like, though it was sold 20 years ago – her three-level plant stand, the plates lining the walls, the window over her sink – but these visual memories don’t have the power that smell does. The funny thing is, I can’t even begin to describe the odor(气味) that was so distinctively hers. The best I can do is this: “It smelled like my grandmother’s house.”
It’s a common experience, and a common linguistic( 语言学的) problem. In cultures worldwide, people have powerful olfactory memories. This odor-memory link is also called “the Proust phenomenon,” after Marcel Proust’s famous description of the feelings aroused by a cake dipped in tea in “Remembrance of Things Past.”
Olfactory memories seem to be more closely bound up with emotions than are visual or auditory ones.
Not all these memories are pleasant, of course, and smells can also trigger feelings of pain.
It is surprisingly hard for English-speakers to describe the odors that occasion such strong emotions, however. English possesses almost no abstract smell words that pick out links or themes among unrelated aromas(芳香).
We have plenty of these in the visual field. “Yellow,” for example, identifies a characteristic that bananas, lemons, some cars, some flowers, old book pages, and the sun all share.
But for odors, we don’t have many more than the vague “musty” (smells old and stale) and “musky” (smells perfumey). We usually have no choice but to say that one thing smells like another – like a banana, like garlic, like diesel fuel.
A few languages, though, do have a rich odor vocabulary. Linguist Asifa Majid has found that the Jahai, the Semaq Beri, and the Maniq, hunter-gatherer groups in Malaysia and Thailand, employ a wide range of abstract smell words and can identify aromas as easily as we can colors. The Jahai have a word, for example, that describes “the seemingly dissimilar smell of petrol, smoke, bat poop, root of wild ginger and wood of wild mango.”
Last year my cat got sprayed by a skunk(臭鼬), and the vet told me to wash its face with coffee to cover the bad smell. Until then, I had never realized that coffee, which I find delicious, smells remarkably like skunk spray, which I do not.
Science has identified the chemicals that both share. They are called mercaptans (硫醇). But in oral English, we have no word for the underlying note that connects these two odors. If the Jahai drank coffee and encountered skunks, I bet they would.
1.The opening paragraph is mainly intended to .
A.express the writer’s affection for his grandmother
B.direct the readers’ attention to a linguistic problem
C.tell us the odor of the grandmother’s house stayed the same
D.prove smell has a greater power than visual memories
2.Which of the following is related to olfactory memories?
A.Forming an image in mind after seeing the word “injury”.
B.Feeling sympathetic when seeing a sick cat.
C.Dancing to the music upon hearing it played.
D.Missing fried eggs with garlic cooked by mum.
3.The example of the Jahai suggests that .
A.the Jahai don’t have many words in the visual field
B.English possesses many vague words like “musty” and “musky”
C.the Jahai has more abstract smell words than English
D.skunk and coffee have the same smell, but different functions
4.What can we learn from the passage?
A.The author feels pity about the limitation of his language.
B.English has a wide range of visual and odor vocabulary.
C.Olfactory memories can bring nothing but pleasant feelings.
D.Cultures worldwide always collide with each other.
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