the.com/stench
a smell with the confidence to enter a room before you do
means A strong, foul, offensive odor — the kind that lingers and overpowers.
from From Old English 'stenc,' meaning 'a smell or odor,' which in those days could swing either way — pleasant or vile. It's tied to the verb 'stincan' (to emit a smell), the same root that gives us 'stink.' Over the centuries the word soured: where 'stench' once described any scent, it narrowed to the bad ones, while its cousin 'stink' kept the verb-work. A relative of Dutch 'stank' and German 'Gestank,' all sharing a Germanic ancestor for the act of smelling — back when smelling something and being smelled were one and the same.
- detection limit
- the nose senses some odors at a few molecules
- survival tool
- rotting smells trigger instinctive disgust to avoid poison
- corpse flower
- mimics dead flesh to lure pollinating flies
- sweat truth
- fresh sweat is odorless until bacteria feast on it
- olfactory memory
- smells reach the brain faster than other senses
great stink of london — 1858 thames river pollution so severe parliament had to adjourn, caused by 2 million tons of raw sewage annually
aral sea towns — uzbekistan and kazakhstan, chemical and pesticide stench from dessicated lake bed, 90% water loss since 1960
duvalier's prison — fort-dimanche in haiti, political prisoners held in below-ground cells, notorious for overwhelming smell of human waste and decay