When you grow up in the United States, you only encounter cheese with limited smell (and taste).

Kraft American Cheese Slices? No flavor or odor. Mozzarella sticks? Some flavor, no smell. Cream cheese? More flavor, sure, yet entirely smell-less. Cheddar and random-white-cheese cubes? Minimal flavor and smell. (My hypothesis: These qualities—or lack thereof—give these flavorless, gummy-consistency cubes their pride of place in event buffets.)

Therefore, the American query heard when someone whiffs a fart—“Who cut the cheese?”—never made much sense to me. (Even when it made me snicker.)

Only marrying into a French family and moving to the French part of Switzerland helped me to understand that “Who cut the cheese?” has actual context.

I’ve had several moments over the past couple of years (including a stay in a fancy hotel in Verbier) when I’ve smelled an atrocious stink and have looked around with a sour moue for the culprit—including a time while enclosed over the holiday with Arnaud’s family in a rural house in rainy Normandy, when I thought surely someone had eaten something truly disagreeable to his or her digestive tract—only to realize that someone had simply opened the refrigerator at some point in the last sixty seconds. (You don’t have to stand in said kitchen when the refrigerator door cracks to smell the smell.)

Yet despite the actual context for the American phrase, the French don’t reference cheese when they smell a fart.

When Arnaud’s mother saw me looking around the shared house at the holidays with a squinty face, she smiled and said, “Qui a lâché Médor?”

At first, I thought she’d asked me something about someone named Médor. Just as I wondered whether I knew someone with that name and tried to figure out how to respond in French, Arnaud jumped in with an explanation.

The French version of the stereotypical dog name—in the United States, we use the name “Spot”—is “Médor.” (I don’t know why. I’ll figure it out at some point.) Instead of asking who cut the cheese—clearly, the French esteem cheese far too highly to disparage its smell—the French ask who let in the dog. (Yes, I could make several old-school hip-hop references. I’ll spare you.)

I can’t say I ever opened the door, let in my dog, and smelled fart, but to each culture its own.