Three Centuries' Perspectives

on Race and Racism

Age-Old Fallacies of Thinking and Stinking

We shudder at the thought of repeating the initial sins of our

species. Thus, Hamlet's uncle bewails his act of fratricide by recall-

ing Cain's slaying of Abel:

O! my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;

It hath the primal eldest curse upon't;

A brother's murder!

Such metaphors of unsavory odor are especially powerful be-

cause our sense of smell lies so deep in our evolutionary construc-

tion, yet remains (perhaps for this reason) so undervalued and often

unmentioned in our culture. A later seventeenth-century English

writer recognized this potency and particularly warned his readers

against using olfactory metaphors because common people will take

them literally:

Metaphorical expression did often proceed into a literal construction; but

was fraudulent.... How dangerous it is in sensible things to use metaphori-

cal expressions unto the people, and what absurd conceits they will swallow

in their literals.

This quotation comes from a chapter in the 1646 work of Sir

Thomas Browne: Pseudodoxia Epidemical or, Enquiries into Very Many

Received Tenents [sic], and Commonly Presumed Truths. Browne, a physi-

cian from Norwich, is better known for his wonderful and still

widely read work of 1642, the part autobiographical, part philo-