Today I came across yet another reason to back Boris Johnson in his campaign to oust Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London: his favourite word is "carminative". Thanks to Dot Wordsworth for giving me this to mull over as I walk the bemerded streets of Islington:

This does not, as the BBC reported, mean ‘the effects of relieving flatulence’, but ‘promoting the expression of flatulence’. Jonathan Swift wrote the memorable couplet ‘Carminative and diuretic / Will damp all passion sympathetic.’

A character in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow explains why he had used it in error in a line of poetry that he had written: ‘And passion carminative as wine’. In carminative, he explains, ‘was the idea of singing and the idea of flesh, rose-coloured and warm, with a suggestion of the jollities of mi-Carême and the masked holidays of Venice. Carminative — the warmth, the glow, the interior ripeness were all in the word.’ Then it occurred to him to look it up in a dictionary.

Update: It has occurred to me that this is not the first time the word "carminative" has been used at this site. It is the kind of word that repeats on you.