Rebarbative

Rebarbative (pronounced ree-bahr-buh-tiv)

(1) Causing annoyance, irritation, or aversion; repellent.

(2) Fearsome; forbidding (obsolete).

1885: From the French rébarbative, the feminine form of the fourteenth century rébarbatif (disagreeable; repellent; unattractive), from the Middle French rébarber (to oppose; to stand up to;to be unattractive) from the Old French rebarber (to repel (an enemy), to withstand (him) face to face).  The construct was ré- + barbe (beard) + -atif (-ative).  The re- prefix is from the Middle English re-, from the circa 1200 Old French re-, from the Latin re- & red- (back; anew; again; against), from the primitive Indo-European wre & wret- (again), a metathetic alteration of wert- (to turn).  It displaced the native English ed- & eft-.  A hyphen is not normally included in words formed using this prefix, except when the absence of a hyphen would (1) make the meaning unclear, (2) when the word with which the prefix is combined begins with a capital letter, (3) when the word with which the is combined with begins with another “re”, (4) when the word with which the prefix is combined with begins with “e”, (5) when the word formed is identical in form to another word in which re- does not have any of the senses listed above.  As late as the early twentieth century, the dieresis was sometimes used instead of a hyphen (eg reemerge) but this is now rare except when demanded for historic authenticity or if there’s an attempt deliberately to affect the archaic.  Re- may (and has) been applied to almost any verb and previously irregular constructions appear regularly in informal use; the exception is all forms of “be” and the modal verbs (can, should etc).  Although it seems certain the origin of the Latin re- is the primitive Indo-European wre & wret- (which has a parallel in Umbrian re-), beyond that it’s uncertain and while it seems always to have conveyed the general sense of "back" or "backwards", there were instances where the precise was unclear and the prolific productivity in Classical Latin tended make things obscure.  Barbe was from the Latin barba (beard), literally “to stand beard to beard against”   The –atif suffix was used in Latin to indicate “of, related to, or associated with the thing specified”.

The generally accepted theory for the origin of the word is the itchy, irritating quality of a beard.  The word is applied now to anyone really annoying.

Crooked Hillary Clinton.