Some people are supertasters. I am a supersmeller. I smell everything, even from great distances, and let me tell you, it is a curse. During my pregnancies (long, long ago), it was even worse. I was smelling for two, you might say. One morning, during the first trimester of my first pregnancy, I was getting ready for work in the upstairs bedroom of our townhouse. It was a big townhouse, with extremely high ceilings, and the bedroom was at the very back. Downstairs in the kitchen, at the opposite end of the building, my husband made a terrible mistake. He opened a can of tuna. It was awful. So awful, that 20 years later, I still remember it as one of the worst things he has ever done to me.

So, you can imagine my distress when we moved to Northern California ten years ago, and I discovered that, while we may not experience the traditional four seasons, we do have a special season all our own: skunk season. Every fall, just after school begins, the aroma of skunk musk fouls the air of our otherwise Eden-like peninsula. Why? My best guess is because of the surge of highway traffic in September. Everyone is back to work, back to school, back to driving really fast at exactly the same time on exactly the same roads. Roads that skunks, alas, occasionally wish to cross. Poor skunks.

And poor us. For the past ten years, back-to-school has meant driving to Staples for a cartload of binders, highlighters, and personal-organizers-which-shall-never-be-used, all the while thinking, “Dammit, I can’t seem to get that stupid Louden Wainwright song out of my mind.”

One day, when my boys were in elementary school, we made an amazing discovery: Simon, my youngest, is immune to the smell of skunk. (Which is weird, now that I think of it, because he can smell weed, which is similar. In fact, he calls the aroma of Mary Jane the “smell of the Bay Area.”)

That morning, we were speeding to school down I-280, when we hit a wall of skunky air. It was sudden and strong, and Ian (my older son) and I both let out a groan. “What’s wrong?” Simon asked, looking around for the cause of our distress. Ian and I clapped our hands over our noses and shouted in unison, “Skunk!” Simon sniffed the air calmly from his perch in the back seat and said, “I don’t smell anything.”

Ian and I were incredulous. The smell was so strong we could actually taste it. “What are you, smeff?” Ian snapped at his brother. And thus, a word was born.

Smeff. Any English speaker who hears it in context would immediately know what it means. As Ian describes it, it means “hard of smelling,” the olfactory corollary to deaf. I hadn’t written it before today, but I know how it’s spelled—not “smeaf” like its auditory cousin, but with a terminal double consonant, like “smell,” the sense it lacks. Ian concurs.

We use the word all the time around our house. It has also entered the lexicon of my personal trainer, who suffers from smeffness (which is not such a bad thing in his line of work). Somehow, though, I’m surprised that after all these years, this wonderful word hasn’t come into wider usage.

Smeff: Pass it on.