Walking to the station the other day I was thinking how annoying it is that, when people are invited to name their favourite words, so many answer serendipity. Then, blow me if the next news report I read didn’t detail an invitation from Education Action, a charity, to send in favourite words to celebrate Literacy Day. (There is such a thing.) ‘The most popular so far,’ said someone involved, ‘are those associated with positive aspirations, like peace, love, and serendipity.’
Yet serendipity is in a different category from peace or love. People might like peace and love, but it’s the sound of serendipity they like. It is like Boris Johnson’s choice: carminative. 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’.
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