Taste and smell

Hardly any field is as poor in everyday words as this one: everything is « nice » or « odd ». Spanish separates cleanly between what happens on the tongue (astringente, untuoso), what happens in the nose (el aroma floral) and what is left afterwards (el sabor que queda). The word to carry away is picante, in picante ascendente, with its noun el picor in el picor residual. English uses one word, « hot », for two things this list keeps side by side: the temperature — el contraste de temperaturas stands a line above — and the burn of the chilli. Spanish has caliente for the first and picante for the second and never mixes them, which is why una sopa caliente y picante is not a repetition while « a hot soup » leaves the question open.