ugsome

ugsome \UHG-suhm\, adjective:

Scot. and North England. horrid; loathsome.

Slowly she turned to find herself facing a man with a scarred hollow at his temple, a very ugsome fellow. “I don't know you,” she said. “Leave me alone.”
-- Lisa Klein, Love Disguised, 2013

“Whatever would compel a young lass to look so ugsome?” While Rose ducked her head, embarrassed, Leana curtsied and extended her hand.
-- Liz Curtis Higgs, Whence Came a Prince, 2005

Ugsome is from the Middle English word ugg meaning "to fear, cause loathing" which is probably rooted in the Old Norse word ugga.

riposte

riposte \ri-POHST\, noun:

1. a quick, sharp return in speech or action; counterstroke: a brilliant riposte to an insult.
2. Fencing. a quick thrust given after parrying a lunge.

verb:
1. to make a riposte.
2. to reply or retaliate.

He remembered von Neumann's sly riposte to Oppenheimer's famous words quoted from the Bhagavad Gita after the Trinity implosion was heard around the world on July 16, 1945.
-- Bradford Morrow, Ariel's Crossing, 2002

Bantering, smart but tentative as shy circling children, both of us checking covertly after each riposte to make sure we hadn't crossed any line or hurt any feelings.
-- Tana French, In the Woods, 2007

Riposte comes from the French word of the same spelling which means "a prompt answer."

squib

squib \skwib\, noun:

1. a short and witty or sarcastic saying or writing.
2. Journalism. a short news story, often used as a filler.

verb:
1. to write squibs.
2. to shoot a squib.

This last is a sarcastic squib partly based on an experience of Gérard de Nerval's in Vienna.
-- Théophile Gautier (1811-1872), translated by Richard Holmes, My Fantoms, published in 2008

His tendency to uphold technical views gave rise to a very clever squib by the late Mr. Justice Hayes, in which the spirit of the baron is supposed to arrive in Hades…
-- William Ballantine, Some Experiences of a Barrister's Life, 1883

Squib is of unknown origin, though it entered English in the 1500s.

boîte

boîte \bwaht; Fr. bwat\, noun:

a nightclub; cabaret.

Three more people entered the boîte and one of them was Clarisse. She saw Daniel, nodded without smiling and looked for a place to sit.
-- Hugh MacLennan, Return of the Sphinx, 1967

You're here now, at this groovy new boîte, for instance.
-- Kim Moritsugu, The Restoration of Emily, 2006

Boîte entered English in the early 1900s from the French word of the same spelling, which literally means "box" but is also used to refer to a nightclub, from the phrase boîte de nuit which means "box of the night."

pettifogging

pettifogging \PET-ee-fog-ing, -faw-ging\, adjective:

1. insignificant; petty: pettifogging details.
2. dishonest or unethical in insignificant matters; meanly petty.

The state legislature at this time was ruled over by a small group of wire-pulling, pettifogging, corporation-controlled individuals who came up from the respective towns, counties, and cities of the state, but who bore the same relation to the communities which they represented and to their superiors and equals in and out of the legislative halls at Springfield that men do to such allies anywhere in any given field.
-- Theodore Dreiser, The Titan, 1914

…since she was habitually absorbed in worsted work, and it was probably from her that Telemachus got his mean, pettifoggingdisposition, always anxious about the property and the daily consumption of meat, no inference can be drawn from this already dubious scandal as to the relation between companionship and constancy.
-- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 1876

Pettifogging comes from a combination of the word petty and the Middle Dutch word voger meaning "one who arranges things." The verbpettifog is a backformation of this term.

banal

banal \buh-NAL, -NAHL, BEYN-l\, adjective:

devoid of freshness or originality; hackneyed; trite: a banal and sophomoric treatment of courage on the frontier.

This sounds almost banal, and in fact it has become banal, thanks to the frog-like perspective of Darwin and such like.
-- Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye, 1939

The banal fact of the existence of time, the confines that social life imposes on continuous time - a frontier around the abstract, a limit on the unknown - brings me back to myself.
-- Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), translated by Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet, published in 2010

Banal originally comes from the French word ban which referred to compulsory military service. Since this law applied to everyone, the word came to be associated with what was commonplace.

aphesis

aphesis \AF-uh-sis\, noun:

Historical Linguistics. the disappearance or loss of an unstressed initial vowel or syllable, as in the formation of the word slant fromaslant.

In particular, phrases forming a solid continuous unit and having only one main stress can become subjected to aphesis and other phonetic changes.
-- Mikko Luukko, Grammatical Variation in Neo-Assyrian, 2004

In other cases we witness aphaeresis, or rather aphesis, the loss of initial segments in the MAGY words…
-- György Busztin, The Legacy of the Barang People, 2006

Aphesis is derived from the Greek word of the same spelling meaning "a letting go."