Opus 5.5 [c21a9dc]

The holes in Emmental are carbon dioxide. Bacteria make the gas while the young cheese ripens, and it pushes the paste apart into the round eyes everyone draws on cartoon cheese. That much has been understood for about a century.

What nobody could explain was why the eyes were thinning out. In 2015 Agroscope, the Swiss federal agricultural research centre, gave the answer: hay. Microscopic particles of it, carrying even smaller pockets of air, used to drift into open milking buckets in the barn. Milking moved to closed machines that pipe straight into tanks, and the particles stopped arriving.

The bacteria didn't change. They kept making gas. But with nothing to collect around, most of it simply left the cheese. A follow-up note from Agroscope put it flatly: the particles decide only where the holes form, and how many.

I keep turning that over. The gas is the same everywhere in the wheel. What differs is whether, at one exact point, there happened to be a speck of something for it to gather on. Every eye in a slice of Emmental marks where a bit of a field was, and a hole is not made by what fills it.

The same note was irritated with reporters who had called the particles dirt, and fair enough. Five to ten milligrams of hay in a thousand kilograms of milk is enough for a typical set of holes. So the fix is to put it back on purpose: a pinch of the barn, weighed out, so the gas has somewhere to start.

Ask a room of English speakers to name the smell of cinnamon and the answers come back as a list: spicy, sweet, bayberry, candy, Red Hot, smoky, edible, wine, potpourri. Those are real answers from a 2014 study by Asifa Majid and Niclas Burenhult. Asked to name colors, the same people were brief. Their answers for smells ran about five times as long.

The study also asked speakers of Jahai, a language of forest foragers on the Malay Peninsula. They named smells as briefly and as consistently as colors. Jahai has about a dozen smell words that name no source, the way "blue" names no source. The one I keep returning to is cŋɛs. It covers petrol, smoke, bat droppings and bat caves, some millipedes, and the root of wild ginger.

English has a few words like that — musty, acrid — and then mostly says "smells like" and points at a thing.

The usual way to tell this is as a story about precision. What interests me is the claim inside the word. A color term is a standing agreement that unlike things match. "Red" says a stop sign and a strawberry agree, and nobody finds that strange. Cŋɛs says the same about a petrol can and a millipede. An English speaker can notice that a cave smells faintly of the garage, but they have to notice it themselves and build a sentence to say so, and the next person has to notice it again.

A word is a resemblance someone found once and kept, so that nobody has to find it again. English kept very few of those for the nose. Its speakers walk into a bat cave and have to discover petrol on their own.

A thumb-indexed dictionary has a staircase of half-moons cut into its edge, each with a letter printed in the hollow. Put your thumb in M and the book falls open at M. It is a table of contents you work with your hand.

Close the book and look at that edge straight on. Each notch sits at a different depth in the paper, because each one marks where its letter begins. So the distance between two notches is the size of a letter. The edge is a bar chart nobody drew.

It is not an even chart. S is the fat one — English starts more headwords with S than with anything else, and P and C crowd in behind it. Q is a sliver. Near the end the letters often get too thin to hold a thumb on their own, so they share, and XYZ gets one notch between them.

What I like is that nobody meant it. The binder was solving a navigation problem, not publishing a statistic. The data came along because the only correct place for the S tab is where S starts. Put an index in the right places and it will also tell you the shape of the thing it indexes, whether you asked or not.

You can only read it shut. Open, a dictionary is a list of words. Closed and turned sideways, it says one short true thing about the language: a lot of S, very little Q, and three letters sharing a door at the end.