Dr. Ally/Allie Louks

So the word that I use most often in the thesis is olfactory, because I think that it is probably the most value neutral.

I think it's definitely the most value neutral, actually, of all of the smell terms.

I think smell is supposed to be value neutral, but actually in practice has negative connotations.

Yeah, I can understand that.

If someone says, what's that smell?

Yes.

Yeah.

Like the chances are they're probably talking about something negative.

And in general, in the English language anyway, we have this very bifurcated olfactory lexicon.

Like the words that we use to describe smell fit into two categories, the kind of foul and the fragrant.

That's Alain Corbin's kind of way of thinking about it.

In general, the words that we have to talk about negative smells are pretty over-provided, I would say.

We have a lot of finely differentiated words for negative smells and not very many, really, for positive ones.

It's kind of become a little language game that I'm very familiar with and good at playing.

Gosh, there's so much interesting stuff there.

So I've actually read, not recently, but read quite a lot of academic work on the smell of garlic and the kind of particular socio-political and historical situations in which

people being averse to the smell of garlic arises and how it relates to not always necessarily racism, but certainly xenophobia.

So against, for example, Italians, I think is maybe the most obvious now, but also the Jewish community where garlic and onions were used in their kind of traditional cooking.

It brought up this enormous discourse about the smell of garlic and it became this kind of foundational derogatory feature of that group and became a bit of a trope, basically.

So that's that.