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).