Reference point
Go out onto a concrete yard at midday just before rain, bend down and smell.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Dry, dusty, mineral, with almost nothing organic to hold on to.
This is the hardest entry in the whole set, because it cannot be described by comparison. Very few other entries are so hard to anchor. The nearest is fresh-fired ceramic — also mineral meeting moisture — but ceramic is cool and repeatable, while hot cement is not. There are smells for which language can do only one thing: point.
It is also the entry that shows the limits of this dictionary itself. An honest dictionary has to have a place to admit that it cannot say, and this is that place.
How to smell it
Go out onto a concrete yard in the midday sun, bend down to about three hand-spans from the surface and smell. Do it again just before rain, when the humidity has risen but the rain has not yet fallen — the smell is much stronger. Don’t try to find words; just remember the sensation.
Why this one is hard
Because there is no ready vocabulary. Most people who try will say hot or dusty, and neither is a smell.
Don’t confuse with
This entry
Hot cement
Smoky & Mineral family
Hot cement is the smell of a reaction in progress, present only in the first hours. Fresh-fired ceramic is the smell of cooled mineral re-absorbing moisture, and it is repeatable.
Scientific note
Hot cement gives off its smell when the hydration reaction releases heat and drives out water vapour together with traces of organic matter in the aggregate. It is the smell of a chemical reaction in progress rather than of a material at rest — it exists only in the first hours and never returns.
In Vietnamese life
This smell belongs to the city rather than to nature, so it rarely appears in literature. For many people living in cities today, the life of the nose takes place on concrete more than on earth.