REBARBATIVE

[Dr. Goodword]

• rebarbative •

Pronunciation: ree-bahr-bê-tiv • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Adjective

Meaning: Repulsive, repellant.

Notes: Today's Good Word comes from a good family, including an adverb, rebarbatively and two different nouns: rebarbativity and rebarbativeness. No—however repulsive barbarians may be, the word barbarian is unrelated to today's Good Word.

In Play: Today's word is applied to the antitheses: "Maude Lynn Dresser found the company's new dress code utterly rebarbative to her sense of style and fashion." But then her fellow workers find Maude Lynn's personality as rebarbative as her clothing. Kids, if you ever need your parents to run to the dictionary so that you can slip out, try this: "Mom! I find your insistence that I clean my room before going out a rebarbative abuse of parental authority!" I would clean a child's room just to hear their mastery of a lexical gem like today's Good Word.

Word History: Today's Good Word is the French feminine adjective rébarbative, unchanged except for the removal of the cute acute on the first E. The French adjective was made from the verb rebarber "to confront", itself consisting of the prefix re- "back, again" + barbe "beard". Apparently, the original sense of this word was something on the order of "(facing) beard-to-beard". The original root for the word "beard" in the Indo-European languages apparently ended on a D. That would explain the final D in beard, Serbian brada, and Russian boroda, root of the name of the Russian composer, Borodin. Latin shifted the D to a B, resulting in barba. It remained barba in Spanish but was reduced to barbe in French.

[Stargzer]

... Kids, if you ever need your parents to run to the dictionary so that you can slip out, try this: "Mom! I find your insistence that I clean my room before going out a rebarbative abuse of parental authority!" I would clean a child's room just to hear their mastery of a lexical gem like today's Good Word. ...

I wonder how many parents would forego the dictionary and just wash their kid's mouth out with soap, perhaps employing the dictionary in the administration of a pre-Dr. Spockian posterior parental attitude adjustment?

This is one Good Word, like Quean, that I'll have to make a point of remembering.

Judging it from its looks, though, my first thought that it was either a chemical used to reinstall re-bar in concrete, or a concoction one could buy at the barbershop to regrow a beard. Let's hope it's a long time before we need the latter for our own Good Doctor!

[sluggo]

The above usage caught my eye:

... The original root for the word "beard" in the Indo-European languages apparently ended on a D.

Assuming normal usage would say ended in or ended with, I wonder if Doc had music in his head while writing this- in Cape Breton traditional music arrangements are said to be constructed "on" D or whatever key (whereas elsewhere music is in a particular key).

I see no fault in this use, it's just an interesting style. Actually makes more sense than in if we think about it.