A smell by any other name

Reminiscent of love and with an unmistakable odour of death, the little stinkers of the natural world might incite repulsion, but they are only doing their job, pleads

- Ian Morton

IT’S an ancient word of Germanic origin that was first published in Handlyng Synne, a Middle English work of 1303 by Lincolnshire chronicler Robert Mannyng. Then it made an appearance in The Canterbury Tales of 1387-1400, when Chaucer referred to brimstone-smelling alchemists as ‘stynken as a goat’. A stink is awful— a stench, a reek, a pong. It merits no qualification. Or does it? Human response to a bad smell is to recoil from something messy or unhealthy, so a stink is a natural positive, its purpose transcending repulsion. We are misguided if we dismiss something because it smells bad to us. However, no natural pong compares with the fulsome downwind experience when the farmers are muck-spreading.

Stinking hellebore (