Recently, I came across the term perfumigate, a clever blend of perfume and fumigate> (Urban Dictionary defines it as excessively spraying perfume or cologne to the point where the scent becomes overpowering). The word perfume was originally used to describe any smell in general before it became associated with pleasant scents in the 1530s. It was adopted from Middle French parfum, which originated from the verb parfumer meaning “to scent”. The etymology of parfumer can be traced back to Latin, possibly through Occitan, Old Provençal, Italian, and/or Spanish, with the prefix per- meaning “through” and the root fumare meaning “to smoke”. The Latin root fumare itself stems from the Proto-Indo-European root duhmos, which also means “smoke”.
