Sentir

v. – to feel or to smell

Someone I recently met suggested I blog about this French word because of its dual meanings. I realized though that in English, the verbs for smell and feel can also be interchangeable. Allow me to back track for a moment in order to give an example.

A few weeks ago while walking my dog in the Champs de Mars, I met a lovely woman walking her own. She happens to be a writer and her latest book is called Consequential Strangers http://www.consequentialstrangers.com. To borrow a quote from her own blog on the topic, consequential strangers are “people who bring novelty and information into our lives, allow us to exercise different parts of ourselves, and open us up to new opportunities.” And this is what we immediately became.

Not long after our encounter, we ran into each other again and since she was about to leave Paris for a while, she invited us to a going away party at her place. It was here that I met the person who suggested blogging about sentir. So now I will get to my example about that verb since it’s all intertwined.

Even though I didn’t know my new stranger/friend for very long, her absence is marked. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that it coincided with the nasty turn in weather and as a result a feeling of emptiness in the park. Where as a few weeks ago, the park was filled with sunlight and golden leaves, now it’s grey and grim and the center where all the dogs congregate looks barren and cold. The French call it grisaille and it's just as it sounds, grey and drizzly or grizzly as I like to call it.

Today as Felix and I approached that center where he used to love to run and play, we came upon a man, his child, one dog off leash and one dog on. Something about the dog on the leash didn’t “smell” right and I slowed my approach. Sure enough the man warned me that the dog wasn’t nice. In fact, he looked downright vicious with one eye missing surely from a fight. I managed to grab my little pup in time to avoid harm, but as another woman passing by pointed out, if the dog is vicious it should be muzzled, not just leashed.

Perhaps the reason we use this word to mean both smell and feel comes from the fact that a dog’s sense of smell is so strong that he can actually learn many things from it. Today, unfortunately, Felix and I both learned to smell danger. And today I met an INconsequential stranger I hope never to see again.