What does anger smell like

When CVA was present, the number of aggressive rearing and lunging jumps was more than five times normal levels. After identifying the pheromone, the scientists set out to find the part of the fly's antennae, the receptor, that binds to CVA.

They removed one gene that encodes for specific receptors in fruit flies. These genetically modified flies were unable to smell CVA, and no amount of the CVA could trigger aggressive behavior. Humans that smell CVA, however, don't fly into a rage. This pheromone is a way to keep fly populations in check. When the number of flies becomes too large, some flies decide to forgo the fighting and find another food source. Although Anderson and his colleagues were able to isolate the chemical that produces aggression in flies, what about humans?

Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. As such, this expression involves metonymy where a part spirit stands for the whole person. More interesting in this context is the metaphoric mapping of the negative property associated with the olfactory root - heemt to the emotional domain, specifically anger.

To our knowledge, this is the first reported case of a metaphoric extension from olfaction to a specific emotion as opposed to general negative affect; cf. The iisax cheemt expression is heard in everyday conversation and appears in texts 3 as a way to express anger. This targeted elicitation did not result in alternative expressions of anger or evidence that speakers conceptualize anger as a liquid or gas under pressure.

Rather, we documented expressions indicating that Seri speakers likely conceptualize anger, iisax cheemt , in terms of quantity. The object of the verb is the person the subject is angry with. This raises the question of what motivates this expression. Many scholars have pointed to the close relationship between odors and emotion. They claim the strong link between odor and emotion is what allows people or any organism to make a swift response to an entity: if it smells bad, avoid it; if it smells good, approach.

Others have pointed to the close link between odors and memory. More specifically, grounding is based in the physiological similarities shared between olfactory and emotion experiences. However, the Seri expression iisax cheemt is not simply a case of the bad is smelly metaphor that has been described previously e. It should be noted, however, that there is an overlap between anger and disgust. The term iisax cheemt can be used to describe some situations of disgust.

This is not so unusual; other languages have also been shown to conflate anger and disgust lexically e. Seri speakers use this expression to describe emotional responses by individuals during community conflict, and when children get upset with each other while playing. For example, in one scenario a person is accused of being lazy by their father after coming back from a long day of hard work in the company of friends, and in another a favorite keepsake is broken by a boy in the village.

Both scenarios elicited iisax cheemt. For example, Alaoui—Ismaili and colleagues gave people pleasant and unpleasant odors, and measured both verbal and physiological responses to each smell.

They found that people described unpleasant odors as disgusting , but the simultaneous physiological measures e. Together, all this suggests a possible experiential correlation of unpleasant smells and anger, likely mediated through disgust. To summarize, the Seri data suggest the pressurized container metaphor for anger does not apply in this language.

Instead, all the available data confirm the primary way to express anger in Seri is that it stinks in a particular way.

At the same time, the linguistic expression of this metaphor is limited: it only appears in the expression iisax cheemt and its causativized counter-part iisax caheemotim. So, the mapping of odors to emotions is not a systemic mapping across the two fields. Psychologists point to the close relationship between odors and emotion, but the Seri data highlight that the mapping can also be specific.

This case study shows how valuable data from lesser-described languages can be in both testing existing theories and highlighting novel ways that people can use to conceptualize themselves and their world. In the next section, we explore another interesting way Seri smell language goes beyond its literal meaning.

Outside of the domain of emotion, verbal idioms involving smell roots lexicalize a state, property, or activity, and there is one example of a meteorological verb.

For each complex expression in Table 3 , a free translation of the Seri expression is provided in English followed by a literal translation, and a column with information related to the cultural relevance of the term or its referent, when applicable. The majority of the complex expressions are formally transparent to native speakers i. The expressions also follow the regular syntactic patterns of the language. Verbal expressions involving smell roots that refer to states and activities. Translations verified in Moser and Marlett ; additional cultural information compiled through fieldwork; an anonymous reviewer provided additional information for ipac casa.

These complex verbal expressions illustrate the metaphorical mapping of particular properties from the smell domain onto a different domain. So, smell properties or qualities are likened to properties or qualities of people and states of affairs, as described for other languages without elaborate smell lexicons.

In a distinct pattern in Seri, some verbal idioms take one smell verb casa and others cheemt. This appears motivated by a semantic distinction between the verbs, namely whether volitional or not.

In general terms, smelling is not a voluntary or volitional activity, but something that happens whenever we breathe — an incidental activity. At the same time, it is possible to actively sample air, for example, with the intention of checking whether something is edible.

In Seri, we see this distinction reflected in how some smell verbs are metaphorically mapped. In particular, cheemt is used in expressions that depict non-volitional or passive states of affairs e. Although this distinction of volitionality does not arise in literal uses of Seri smell verbs, its appearance in these expressions is likely a result of the pragmatics of these verbs.

So, the fact that casa carries a more vulgar connotation compared to cheemt is reflected in the metaphoric uses of these two verbs. The more pragmatically loaded verb is mapped to more volitional contexts. Even though the meanings of the components of complex nominal and verbal expressions are known to Seri speakers, the meaning of the expressions themselves cannot be predicted based on the literal meaning of their parts.

Previous studies have analyzed the meaning of idioms as metaphoric or metonymic see, e. The previous sections have focused on examples of verbal idioms and their metaphorical extensions but complex nominal expressions in Seri can also be analyzed as idioms following Marlett The syntactic heads of such expressions frequently consist of a nominal with general referential properties followed by a lexical item that further restricts its reference.

Nominalized forms in multi-word expressions in Seri have a similar function as relative clauses in English. These expressions are transparently decomposable to native speakers and are not specific to one lexical field, but rather are found in countless terms used to refer to plant species, artifacts, and even place names.

Examples are not limited to binomial combinations, e. Nominal expressions for plants that involve a smell verb translations verified in Moser and Marlett ; additional information compiled by authors. The majority of complex nominal expressions that contain olfactory predicates in Seri refer to different kinds of plants. Table 4 lists them all, including four expressions that contain a form of the general smell root csii , three also contain a form of the smell verb casa.

Two other plant names contain only the verb casa. Given the restricted use of - asa as a finite verbal predicate see Table 1 , it is noteworthy that it occurs in at least 10 lexicalized complex expressions Tables 2 — 4.

To better understand these complex nominal expressions, let us consider examples of minimal pairs where one of the pairs has an olfactory predicate and the other does not. The plant reportedly has unpleasant smelling leaves. These examples suggest that olfactory predicates are functioning on par with color and dispositional predicates in the naming of kinds of things.

So, the aromatic property of the leaves provides a distinguishing property. As discussed in Section 2 , the central meaning of ccon concerns cooking-related odors. Similarly, Table 4 provides additional insight into the ways cultural myths and beliefs provide a context for chaining olfactory properties to particular events or properties of objects in the world following Lakoff In addition to naming plants, complex nominal expressions featuring smell in Seri refer to an insect earwig , an introduced domesticated animal cow , and an introduced artifact makeup powder Table 5.

Nominal expressions that contain smell roots and name objects that are not plants translations verified in Moser and Marlett These examples illustrate metonymy at play: smell properties are used to specify reference to particular plant species, insect species, animal species, and artifacts. Rather, olfactory verbs were used in the recent past to coin new expressions in order to name items introduced to Seri culture. In some of the examples we see categorial metonymy, where a particular property of the referent is highlighted in order to make reference to the category.

This is the type of metonymy that is used in expressions like he married money , where money refers to the fact that the spouse has money, not that money is part of the spouse Littlemore : In Seri, plant names refer to particular kinds of plants, primarily based on picking out perceptual characteristics of these plants, where smell is used metonymically to make reference to a kind of plant species, e.

It is possible this particular species is named in contrast to others by foregrounding its olfactory properties, specifically, the pleasant smell that it emits. While the resin is clearly part of the plant, the smell of the resin is the property highlighted in the name, not the resin itself.

This example illustrates the intimate knowledge Seri people have of insects, and the biological world around them. The event described in the story has to do with a man who discovered an important fresh water hole on Tiburon Island. He was a stingy man who hoarded fresh water from other people, and over time his water became putrid and stinky.

He did not mind the smell of the putrid water and still drank it. In the case of the verbal idiom iix casa , there is a base metaphor that stinking is an unpleasant property.

The frame metonymy operates on top of that and results in the meaning of the nominal expression. It is said that if a person cannot detect the smell of the satiny milkvetch as stinky, they are stingy — just like the man in the story.

It has been claimed that olfaction is a relatively poor source domain for metaphor and metonymy e. The case of Seri olfactory metaphor is of particular interest given that Seri has a more elaborate smell lexicon than languages like English, offering the potential for more varied kinds of semantic extension. In fact, Seri displays distinct patterns of extension depending upon the particular smell verb used, suggesting, perhaps, that there is more metaphoric potential for olfaction in languages with more extensive olfactory vocabulary.

Seri smell vocabulary is dominated by verb roots that lexicalize unpleasant smells; correspondingly metaphoric extension from the olfactory domain in Seri tend to map negative properties to the target domain. To the extent that similar patterns attested in majority languages appear in small-scale lesser-described languages — whose speakers live in a different cultural milieu — we can have more confidence in previous generalizations. We also found examples of novel olfactory metaphors where olfactory verbs in idiomatic expressions have more semantically specific meanings than has been previously described in studies of olfactory metaphor.

Specific target domains include: emotional states e. We also do not find instances of olfactory verbs used as predicates in finite clauses meaning general badness or indicating negative properties comparable to that stinks in English; the use of olfactory verbs in such contexts involves the literal meaning of the verbs. The most striking case of olfactory metaphor in Seri is that anger can be conceptualized in terms of an unpleasant smell.

This analysis does not hold for Seri where anger stinks instead. This can be the case even when people verbally report feeling disgusted. This provides a possible bridging context, but still does not definitively answer the question of why this specific odor term became lexicalized for this purpose. It also raises the question of how unique this type of metaphorical expression is. These examples illustrate an overlooked strategy that smell terminology can figure in non-literal usage, and prompts a closer look at familiar languages for possible parallels.

There was an outcry. English stinker [6] is documented as a term used by sailors in the nineteenth and twentieth century to refer to giant fulmar Ossifraga gigantea and other ill-smelling petrels, as well as for strongly worded letters, disagreeable reviews or other communication e. So, the mapping of smell specifically to anger and a constellation of related emotions — rather than broadly to negative valence — appears to be more wide-spread than previously thought.

Metonymy has been said to be pervasive in cognition and more cognitively basic than metaphor Dancygier and Sweetser : It is surprising then that metonymy does not figure more strongly in previous discussions of semantic extension from the perceptual domain. The Seri data presented here illustrate cases of both categorial and frame metonymy in complex nominal expressions that primarily name natural kinds.

There are minimal pairs of complex expressions with different nominalized verb forms. Just as color and other visually perceivable properties can be used to distinguish types of objects, smell can be used similarly in Seri. It is highly likely that these sorts of olfactory expressions for natural kinds are pervasive in other languages too. In English, stink-horn [8] is used to name various ill-smelling types of fungi; stink-pot [9] as a way to name the musk turtle Sternotherus odoratus , known for emitting a stinky odor from its scent glands as a defense mechanism; and stink bugs is the general term used for some insects from the Pentatomidae family, known for giving off an unpleasant odor when crushed.

The name of the satiny milkvetch plant was coined via a story of a stingy man who hoarded putrid water.

These cultural motifs shed further light on the importance of olfaction in Seri culture, and call for more in-depth investigation of the role of sensory perception in oral tradition cross-culturally. WALT: Count the foot in each sentence. WALT: Structure a poem. Tiija - i hate poems. News Search Sign In. Home News Centre. Home Room 6 Writing Poetry. Print Page Content. Metaph or. My mum is purple. She is the spring time. She is cloudy. A rough jersey. My mum is an uncomfortable chair.

She is the T. V show Ellen. My mum is a smooth ambrosia. By Tiija-Kapri Perawiti.