Words: carminative, adj. and n.

"IGNORANCE IS like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone," says Lady Bracknell. And, as the poet Denis rues in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow (1921), "one suffers so much from the fact that beautiful words don't always mean what they ought to mean. Really, for example, I had a whole poem ruined, just because the word `carminative' didn't mean what it ought to have meant."

The OED would have us believe that the word had petered out 50 years earlier, but Huxley gives three pages to a discussion of its erudite possibilities: these range across carnation, carnival, singing and flesh by way of warmth and interior ripeness - but, no, it is a medicine to expel flatulence. It would certainly look better on a Body Shop label than Fart Fennel.