Ackerman Criticism

When I started reading Diane Ackerman's, I was impressed early on with her ability so vividly describe the senses, especially smell. But when I came to the the middle of the passage titled "The Ocean Inside Us", I felt that she was starting to stretch the importance of smell. While it makes perfect sense that smell has the ability to take us back and remember key moments of our life, I found it to be a little bit extreme to use an "ocean inside of us" as a metaphor. She also (as proven by the use of the word snite, amongst others) has a tendency to use adjectives that the average person isn't going to understand off the top of their head. They can guess through inferring, but it's not the same as reading through as passage and knowing every single word. Maybe if Ackerman used different, more common adjectives the power of smell and other senses would be even more apparent to the reader.