A friend of mine, perhaps knowing my lifelong fascination with unusual words, has sent me a short piece about the phenomenon known as petrichor. It was new to me. I consulted the various dictionaries on my shelf, Chambers 1990, Chambers 2016, Bloomsbury Concise, The Shorter Oxford. Petrichor does not appear. I tried Roget’s Thesaurus, Chambers’ Crossword Dictionary and, as a long shot, Churchill’s Medical Dictionary. No sign of petrichor. As a last resort, I went to that final authority of English language and usage, The Oxford English Dictionary, its umpteen volumes compressed in my edition into a single tome, qua microfiche, the decipherment of its hieroglyphics requiring a magnifying glass. I acquired this version of OED at the end of the last millennium, around the same time I got my complete Encyclopaedia Britannica. I suppose such items are deemed redundant in the digital age. Second hand booksellers tell me that Encyclopaedia Britannica is hard to move on.
Back to OED. I knew that if I couldn’t find my word, I would be left without recourse. But there it was.
Petrichor a pleasant, distinctive smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm dry weather in certain regions.
Apparently the word derives from Greek pétra (rock) or pétros (stone) and ikhō’r (the blood of the gods). The petrichor phenomenon was alluded to in a paper given by Berthelot and André at a meeting of the French Académie des Sciences in 1891, entitled Sur l’odeur propre de la Terre. But it was not until 1964 that the phenomenon was scientifically described by Isabel Bear and Dick Thomas in Nature. Thomas coined the term petrichor. Apparently an oil exuded by some plants in dry periods is absorbed by soil and rock, but during rain the oil is released into the air, along with geosmin, a metabolic by-product of actinobacteria. Ozone may also be present in lightning storms.
The ozone rang a bell with me. For I’m sure I’m quite familiar with the petrichor phenomenon, if not the word. I can remember, in the Glasgow of my childhood, summer rain falling on the bone dry streets and pavements, and we would all sniff appreciatively. What’s that smell? One of my friends said, “Ozone”. He said it was the same as the smell of the Glasgow underground. I later dismissed this idea when I read that ozone was a colourless, odourless gas, but there you go.
It occurs to me that the olfactory world of childhood is far richer than that of adulthood. Hillhead Subway Station on Byres Road in Glasgow’s west end had a very distinctive smell, as did the nearby Art Gallery and Museum in Kelvingrove. Hillhead, the Art Galleries, and petrichor had a lot in common. Now I go into the Art Galleries every Thursday lunchtime after my German class to hear an organ recital, and I can’t say I can detect “the smell”. Maybe there is a faint echo if it. Can I remember what that smell was like? Smell, and memory, are intimately connected, perhaps because the parts of the brain that process smell and memory are similarly intimately connected. The Hippocampus. We have all experienced a whiff of something that has transported us back. Does it work the other way? Can a memory evoke a smell? I should think not, at least, not unless pathologically. Such an evocation would be an olfactory hallucination. Did not George Gershwin complain one night, while playing in concert, of the smell of burning rubber? Later he succumbed to a brain tumour.
Can you describe a smell so as to evoke it? I’m not sure that language is capable of conjuring aroma. If I say “petrichor” the odour does not reach my nostrils. Some experiences, maybe most sensual experiences, are beyond language. What does marzipan taste like? I can say it is sweet, but that barely narrows the field. I might attempt extravagant imagery. The confectionary acme of jaggery julepy saccharose nectary Turkish delight… But that is just a word salad.
In my search for petrichor, you might wonder why I didn’t immediately go online. It is because I choose to inhabit an analogue world. It occurs to me that the digital world is devoid of smell. In Primary School, we always loved it when we were issued with some form of glossy. The smell of thick magazine paper was utterly beguiling to us. Mrs Miller would issue some text and we would spend five minutes, enraptured, sniffing the paper. She was rather impatient with us, after the fashion of a dog-walker who can’t understand why her dog wants to pause and sniff lamp posts. She has no conception of the doggy experience. I also love the musty smell of old paper. It reminds me of fossicking in the cupboards of boarding house common rooms during rainy West of Scotland holidays, and discovering ancient hardback copies of Biggles, and Nevil Shute. They have an aroma that Kindle can never know. The experience of holding and reading a real book is also tactile. I must caress my volumes.
jamescalumcampbell 