Rebarbative

2009 August 31, Nicholas Lezard, Down and out in London (column), New Statesman, page 54, I know there are few things more rebarbative than parents who insist, usually against all the evidence, that their children are the bees’ knees, but something seems to have turned out fine.

Poliziano took great pleasure in incorporating the new myths, facts, and variant readings he uncovered as a scholar in his own Latin poems and letters — and in pointing out that he had done so in his most rebarbative technical monographs.

[…]A mystery (1990), for instance, the first book he wrote after arriving in America, stunned critics; for some it was an ambitious and remarkable book, for others it was rebarbative and wilfully obscure.

They wished to transcend it—an astounding political innovation whose inner meaning has been so swathed in rebarbative academic jargon and even more rebarbative officialese that only a tiny minority of the Union′s citizens understand how it works.

Central to the story was Steve Eisman, an eccentric and rebarbative hedge-funder who was one of the earliest to see through the subprime lies.

Houellebecq doesn’t like experts[…]and rebarbative acronyms are the language that experts use to put the rest of us in our place.