The word "rebarbative" is a correctly spelled English word and it is used to describe a person or thing that is off-putting, annoying, or repelling.
Example sentence: Jane's rebarbative attitude made it difficult to work with her.
Instead, the expressions of delight on the faces of ordinary Afghans, and the tales of life under the rebarbative Taliban, have offered eloquent justification for calling the downfall of the regime a liberation.
Judging by his book, Robin Blackburn is made for the part, though viewers might scratch their heads over some of his pet spleens, such as "commodification" and "hyper-capitalist financialisation".As these rebarbative terms suggest, Mr Blackburn is a bit of an old leftie.
But there is no getting around the fact that Kraus's work is rebarbative today.
Bagehot's vocabulary is certainly pellucid, in that the words mean exactly what he intends, unlike the mysterious utterances of adolescents or the various impenetrable professional jargons of today.Hilary Potts LondonSIR – I was intrigued by the absence of "rebarbative", "jejune" and "ineluctable" from the reader's "Concise Oxford English Dictionary".
Mr Brown now has a less rebarbative press team and a better Number 10 operation.
On the other side there are many, including Mr Davis, who are finding the self-conscious touchy-feeliness of the modernisers increasingly rebarbative, and think that it's high time to start banging the drum for traditional Tory policies, such as tax cuts.
But free-speech advocates insist on the church's constitutional right to say rebarbative things, and the courts partly agree.
Not that it's rebarbative, but it has the rare quality of being about big things as if by accident.
There's Josh, a diminutive, curly-haired academic, his six-foot, intellectual Amazon wife Caroline, and their ballet-loving daughter, who all live in a bus together, and there's Caroline's rebarbative mother; while over in Durban, there is Josh's former flame Harriet, a writer of ballet books for children, her domineering Boer husband, and their stroppy teenage daughter;.
Away with pathos!' shouted that composer, extolling his own dry concision: Biss's achievement was to make these rebarbative miniatures seem very big indeed.
In February, we get American comedy at its most cynical and sophisticated in Young Adult, from the Juno team of Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman, with Charlize Theron as a jaw-droppingly rebarbative anti-heroine.
