@Daojoan moved to the us from the uk, where good quality, stinky weed was always referred to as skunk. The etymology never twigged. I spent almost a year driving around occasionally thinking "wow who has set fire to a huge bag of african bush?!" before i finally realized "oh wait"... Facepalm.
@Daojoan The weed comparison is accurate. Strong (some say low-quality) weed, with a sharp sulphuric tinge to it.
I've never been sprayed by a skunk—if you get one mad enough to nail you, you're probably (1) a dog, or (2) did something to warrant it—but in semi-rural New York, where I am, encountering the residual odor isn't uncommon.
@Daojoan I’m an American living in Scotland and this is something I’ve been asked multiple times over the years and an interesting discussion always follows
@Daojoan You’re not missing anything. I once had a family of them move into the crawl space under a townhouse I lived in 15-20 years ago. That was fun.
@Daojoan I saw a comic recently that had two people talking about a bad smell, and one says "it's either pot or a skunk". The next panel shows a skunk smoking pot.
Wish I could find the reference.
But about the two smells...yes, pot can smell a lot like skunk. More so in recent years. I live in San Francisco.
But skunk has this ungeunt quality, like it will never go away and just gets sharper and grosser.
@Daojoan Wait, there are places that don't have skunks? That never occurred to me. I need to move. Seriously, the worst smell I've ever encountered was when skunks got in a storage building at work. A coworker got nuked by them. Direct hit with the spray. It smells like burning rubber mixed with sage. The smell is so strong it makes you vomit. The coworker striped to his underwear and tossed all his close in the trash bin outside and drove home almost nude. I live next to a wooded area and my late lab was always chasing the skunks away. You'd wake up in the middle of the night with the dog barking wildly and you could smell the skunk. That pup managed to never take a direct hit.
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