A jewel on woman’s neck. On the names of female perfume

Diana Saniewska

Uniwersytet w Białymstoku

Abstract

Experiential linguistics, which is focused on the description of sensual sensations, has emerged from cognitive sciences. The author undertakes the issue of verbalized smells, that is the names of perfume, by the author’s choice – the female ones. The discussed examples of perfume naming show the attempts of smell narrativization by applying names conveying great semantic and metaphorical (mini-metaphors) capacity that evoke “Proust effect”. As a exponent of the content richness, we may treat sensual synesthesia and imagery (cultural constructs, floral and geographical names, names connected with the cinema, entertainment, lifestyle, dissemination of a certain brand’s style, abstracts yielding to aestheticization, names connected with altered states of consciousness, names poetizing and additionally defining the image of a woman). The proposed categories of names allow to distract from their symbolic layers the most frequent connotations, due to which the name becomes a germ by (self)narration each time updated by a female user.

Keywords:

perfume, scent, a mini metaphor, narrativization, cognitivism