I'm running behind on vlogbrothers videos, so I just started watching this one in which John repeats the common belief that odors are particularly hard to describe-- that we lack language for them. And I thought this community might want to know that recent anthropological and psychological research shows that, actually, the problem is our language, nothing particular about odor as a sense! Specifically, a number of hunter-gatherer societies have very precise language for odors:
Wnuk, E., & Majid, A. (2014). Revisiting the limits of language: The odor lexicon of Maniq. Cognition, 131(1), 125-138.
Majid, A., & Burenhult, N. (2014). Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language. Cognition, 130(2), 266-270.
Majid, A., & Kruspe, N. (2018). Hunter-gatherer olfaction is special. Current Biology, 28(3), 409-413.
I've actually seen Asifa Majid present this research, and I recall that in addition she explored a representative sample of global languages and their encoding of smells and found that English was particularly bad at it! So it might not be anything special about smell, except in terms of how we relate to it in industrialized (and particularly English-speaking) societies.