oofishy

In Korean, there's a funny word for a funny concept that tries to describe that smell of the outside world that you bring in with you in your pockets, your hoodie hood, all your nooks and crannies and porous places.

	비린내

I wonder what the odor image is to someone with no knowledge of this word -- hey, non-Korean speakers, tell me. Does it sound like a romantic notion? Spring flowers? Freshness?

Because, actually, it means fishy. Not quite like this, but rather like this. And the first association is with sea critters and their fishy friends, though there are secondary notions of "raw meat smells" and maybe like, "briny," in a more general sense, too. As if on your little stroll around the neighborhood you were wading your way through vast oceans of flaky fish scales and seaweed bits. They collected in atomic amounts all through the strands of your hair and the fibers of your cardigan and got stuck there; remnants of the sea intertwined with strips of you, inexplicably woven together, loose french braid webs of oceanness and humanness.

And you can't detect it until you've plopped yourself back into the aquarium-bubble of freshwater homeland and have gone about doing your freshwater business for a little bit and then someone smells your hairs and your cardigan fibers and goes

"oof! You smell outside-fishy"