CM

Interesting. As a native English speaker, while I have heard the expression 'odour of sanctity' and understood it to mean the supposed sweet often floral spell that emanated from saints and their stigmata, I had never encountered the phonetical confusion/pun before your comment. So I think you are correct in that it doesn't work in English as I see no linguistic link between 'odour' and 'praise' or 'homage' etc. Doubtless Nordmann will come up with some convoluted palimpsest back-meaning, but as I say, the basic liguistic confusion just doesn't exist in English, at least not for me.

Of course the real 'odour of sanctity' might just have been the smell of acetone and ethyl ester (which has a distinctive 'fruit-drops' small) caused by ketosis brought on by starvation from fasting or decomposition, but that's another matter.

The strongest thing about the confusion is not only that it existed (if it actually did), but that it generated the idea of the good scent as a proof of spiritual purity. In other terms, had not it happened, we would not be speaking of any odour in this context (except perhaps the natural ones of decomposition) and the Church would not have thought of this as a mark to use as a guide in its deliberations about beatification or sanctification.

Meles meles wrote:

Doubtless Nordmann will come up with some convoluted palimpsest back-meaning

Nope - I can't see how overwritten texts can help at all in this case.

If the confusion between two words is the root of the expression then I would agree it must have come from Spanish, as you indicated, CM. Or at least from a later Romance language and not from Latin itself, where "olor" and "odor" have always had two very different implications indeed, the latter indicating only a smell (in fact "aroma" would have been used to point out a particularly pleasant smell) while the former was reserved for the worst kind of smell - "stink" in fact. Hardly a word one should be using for a saint - even the hermit types who maybe avoided soap and deserved it!

It is true however that the expression became a stock phrase in Catholic church vocabulary in the early Middle Ages and the late Latin "odorem notitiae sanctitáte" an almost mandatory description of sainthood in hagiographical texts. It became indeed what is known as a "dogma of fact" as opposed to "faith" - an undeniable fact upon which the rest of the dogma hangs as an article of faith (which I imagine is why it also therefore received some faux-scientific retrospective justification later regarding body odours at death etc), though the earliest example I could find in the Catholic Encyclopedia was a reference to the Virgin Mary in an encyclical from the 13th century, which rather knocks the idea on the head that its original saintly association was with death at all (she famously avoided that formality). Instead the term describes the state in which she allegedly lived her life.

Use of "odour" as a euphemism for "suggestion" was as common in Latin as in later languages. For example, Caesar's "Bibulus odore tamquam dolo" translates as "Bibulus smells like deceit to me" and caused quite a stir when Julius cited it in a letter to the senate about his co-consul who had just introduced tax reforms without consulting his colleague. If its use in Latin continued unbroken into church usage a thousand or so years later I doubt any self-respecting scribe would have been tempted to use "olore" instead.

If I were to guess I'd say the "origin story" is also something that has been somewhat back-engineered to explain what was in fact just a standard Latin euphemism which made it from Catholic dogma as written officially in Latin into the popular vernacular of Romance language speakers for whom "olore" and "odore" were much more interchangeable terms. But since this cannot be proven then your suggested footnote is of course still totally acceptable, as long as you start with "One suggested etymology humorously attributed to the phrase is ..."

Convoluted, I admit, but then so are people, as is their habit of communicating with no respect for etymological exactitude and an enduring dedication to vivid semantic expression.

Great, Nordmann! This widens up the scope of the whole matter and illuminates with an interesting light the peripetia of words. Even if we "do things with words", as John Austin fabulously explained, many people seem to disdain the meaning and history of words and set expressions because they don't see a "know how" in them… But that will lead us far, far away from the subject.

Thanks for yours answers, Meles meles and Nordmann. I have no words to say my gratitude, .

And at the more pedestrian level, we often read such statements as ....."And  Johnny Whoever was accompanied the  fragrant Sally Whoever. I assume this is in the same genre using scent to define a degree of quality.

Ah yes indeed ... "fragrant" was famously the term the judge, Mr Justice Caulfield, used to describe Mary Archer when he was giving his instructions to the jury in the 1987 libel case involving her husband, Jeffrey Archer MP. (The Daily Star newspaper had run a story alleging Jeffrey Archer had paid for sex with a prostitute, Monica Coghlan. Archer responded by suing the Daily Star. In the end the Daily Star lost the case, but it later emerged that Archer had almost certainly perjured himself during the trial. The Daily Star however were unwilling to risk another potentially costly libel case and so did not pursue this.)

Summing up the case for the jury in 1987, judge Caulfield said:

"Remember Mary Archer in the witness-box. Your vision of her probably will never disappear. Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have, without the strain of this trial, radiance? How would she appeal? Has she had a happy married life? Has she been able to enjoy, rather than endure, her husband Jeffrey?"

He then went on to say of Jeffrey Archer,
"Is he in need of cold, unloving, rubber-insulated sex in a seedy hotel round about quarter to one on a Tuesday morning after an evening at the Caprice?"

So by "fragrant" he didn't mean that she stank of the same (alleged) hypocrisy as her husband but rather that she was an innocent who had loyally supported him and endured the rigours of the trial in a stoic and indeed almost saintly manner.

However in 2001 Jeffrey Archer was formally accused of having committed perjury during the 1987 trial and Mary Archer again appeared at the Old Bailey to defend him. This time Jeffrey Archer was subsequently convicted and imprisoned for perjury and perverting the course of justice. The trial judge, Mr Justice Potts, questioned the veracity of Lady Archer's evidence suggesting that she too had perjured herself, however no further action was taken against her.

So maybe her "fragrance" had always been tainted with a hefty whiff of dishonesty.