Daily Dose of English 19
Incense
Daily Dose of English 19
Intermediate
Hey, everyone! My name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about incense. Incense. Kind of a funny word, isn't it? But incense is that there's like a stick that you burn and it makes things smell good. That wasn't a great explanation. Let me try again. So incense is something that you light on fire, so you burn, and it emits, it creates a good scent. They're made of all sorts of different things that smell nice. And they're pretty common in lots of parts of the world because they're relatively cheap and they smell nice. And people like things that smell nice. I'm sure that you've seen something similar in somebody's house at some point, or you probably maybe use it yourself. There's other ways that it can happen, or it can happen, it can be used and created as well. It doesn't necessarily have to be a stick. You can kind of create little bundles of herbs and spices or something, and people burn those depending on what part of the world the incense might come from. I actually don't really know anything about the history of incense, but I assume it's very, very old because it's relatively simple what it is. Like the technology isn't super complicated. But anyway, I never really used a ton of incense or grew up with it that often. It wasn't like a thing that was kind of in my mind. I didn't really, I'm not a very, from a very religious family, and so it's typically used in like shrines or as part of a ceremony or whatever. And so that side never came into my life. But recently, I've started to use it a lot more because it's more available here. In a lot of the markets, there's just incense that you can buy, and it's pretty cheap to buy, to get, and it's nice. And so I've been using it a lot more just because it creates a nice environment, I guess, and you can get some interesting smells, and it's sort of hard to explain, I guess, if you've never used it regularly. Because I also like the fact that you have to take a bit of a break to start it, right? It doesn't set itself up, right? It's on an automatic system. And so I get to take a couple of minutes to pick out an incense stick to put it in the little plate thing, I guess. I don't really know what that's called, but I have a wooden like slab that I can stick the stick into. There are two uses of the same word, stick, to stick the stick into, and then I light it on with a lighter, English, what a language, right? I light it with a lighter, and I stick the stick into a piece of wood, great, perfect sentence that I've just created there. And then I light the incense, and then it starts to emit its smell. And it lasts like 15 minutes or so, give or take, and it's quite nice. I've got a couple of different flavors, or flavors, scents, scents, spices, scents, I don't know. I've got a couple of different scents that I like. There's a cinnamon, which is nice, frankincense, or holy stick, I think it's called. I actually don't know, I just know the translation in Spanish. But they all smell quite nice, and they fill my apartment with something that you don't really get anywhere else. And it's not that my apartment smells bad or anything, it's just, it smells normal, and maybe kind of boring. But with a little bit of incense, it just brightens everything up a little bit, and since it's not a super strong smell, it just makes things feel a little bit happier. And that kind of got me thinking about what smell does to a place. Because we don't think about it, but smell and sight and sound is something that's constantly with us everywhere in our lives, unless you don't have one of those senses, obviously. But scent and smell is something that I don't really think about that much. Some people think about it more, some people who have things like scented humidifiers, or they put like air fresheners in their car, maybe. But I never really thought about it very much, because I don't like super strong smells. But I do like when I cook or bake, and there's a really nice smell in the place, it sort of fills a room with an aroma, that's a good word. Aroma is typically a good smell, and it also usually has to do with a smell that is around something or in somewhere, and often brings up special, not necessarily thoughts, but it reminds you of something or makes you think of something. So you might talk about the aroma of freshly laundered clothes, or somebody might have a specific aroma. It's a bit of a fancy way to say smell, right, because smell kind of has a negative connotation towards it, right? Oh, that smells, or oh, what's that smell? It can be positive, absolutely, right? Oh, what's that smell? That smells good. But an aroma is a bit more, I don't want to say like fancy, because that's not the right way to describe it. But if you walk into somebody's home, and you think it smells good, later, you might describe it and say, there was a really particular aroma, right, and so it's got like a little bit more of a connotation there to it. But anyway, going back to incense, and so the incense gives my place a nice, just different aroma, because you also get to change the smell. And I think that's something that's also really powerful, because some places, some people's houses always smell the same, or usually if you don't change anything, it's going to smell the same. And so having a bit of variety in there is quite nice, right? If you bake cookies every once in a while, that smell of cookies is really fresh and unique in some ways, because it's new again, right? You haven't smelled it for a couple of weeks. And so that's one of the reasons that I really like the incense is because it adds that bit of variety to things in a way that I don't usually think about, right? With sounds, you can get variety with music and with other people around, there's lots of different ways to get variety with what you hear. With what you see as well, it's important to see different things, go outside, walk around, but also we get tons and tons of visual stimulation on computers and phones, and so you see different things every single day. But with smells, it's a lot harder to get new smells, right? You kind of have this list of things that you don't really get new ones for. And at time of recording, we don't have smell-o-vision, which is what we often refer to, like when you eventually one day we'll figure out how to transmit smells over the internet somehow. There'll be some device that you plug in and it can create smells in your room and you can smell the video that you're watching. That's often referred to as smell-o-vision. And actually, I think it was kind of, I don't really know actually where that name comes from. Huh. Maybe it was an invention somebody tried to do, but I don't know. But we don't have that yet, and so we can't smell videos, we can't smell things from through our phone. I'm not even sure that we're going to want to, but it might be kind of an interesting way to create new kinds of memes, right? Imagine a meme smell, a meme that smells, that'd be very interesting. But until then, you have to kind of go out and search new smells. And I think incense is a way to do that, right? I can go to the market and see hundreds of different kinds of incense and try it out, right? And get a brand new smell. And so I just thought that was kind of a cool idea, which is why I wanted to share it with you today. But it's not really anything important, or even that common, I don't think. But yeah. So I'd be curious to know, what are your thoughts on incense? Is it something that's common where you're from, or do you not like it? Is it too strong for you? Do you prefer softer, lighter smells? Or do you have any favorite kinds of incense that maybe I should try? Let me know down in the comments. They're always open, you're always welcome to share your thoughts on an episode if you want to practice your writing. So yeah. That's all I have for today, but I want to talk for at least another 30 seconds or so to make this episode 10 minutes long. And so I just want to reflect a bit on this podcast, because I've been really enjoying making these recordings. It often gives me more energy. I typically start them with a bit of low energy. I don't really feel amazing when I start, because I typically record later in the day. Right now it's 6.25 PM. But I find that doing this really makes me feel good. It makes me happier, and I feel a bit more inspired to do stuff. I'm also working on the second series that might come out. You might actually have seen the series already on the channel before this episode comes out, because it's going to come out on a different timeline. And I'm really excited about that. And I've been really enjoying this whole project, and I hope that I can continue for at least a few more months, if not for like a year or whatever. But we'll see how much work it is and how much people enjoy it. So yeah. Well anyway, there's my rambling on that. And as usual, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to listen and enjoy and to practice your English. And yeah. Thank you so much for being here. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a little like. And that's everything. I'll see you tomorrow. Have a good one.
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