@catsaladCat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch) It's kinda a limitation of the English language, which uses the one term, “spicy”, to describe a bad amount of chemical reactions.

The most common are reactions are caused by capsaicinoids, like in ghost peppers. That's what the popular Scoville scale is trying to measure, and they kinda burn anywhere they touch.

Then there's the sharp sting of isothiocyanates found in wasabi and horseradish, which is more of a scent than a specific taste.

There are also the sanshools, which cause a numbing sensation on your tongue. Those are most commonly found in Sichuan peppers.

And then the fragrance of the piperines in peppercorn is also called spicy by some white folks.

Some languages have specific common terms for the above sensations, like the Chinese “麻”/“má” for the numbing sensation caused by sanshools.

Other languages have even fewer common terms, such as the German “scharf”, which can refer to all of the above and even the warmth from gingerols in ginger.