efface

"You may have the power to bring down the government. But you cannot efface reality," he said.

From BBC ● Sep. 8, 2025

It’s exceedingly unlikely that Leo had anything to do with her murder, but the show doesn’t efface her tragedy, even as it reckons with the gravity of Leo’s.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 20, 2025

Frankly, to efface all cartographic memorials to racism in Alexandria would require changing the name of the city itself.

From Washington Post ● Jan. 17, 2023

Clichés like these efface the complications of real relationships.

From New York Times ● Apr. 21, 2020

There was nothing more for him but to efface himself, to destroy the unsuccessful structure of his life, to throw it away, mocked at by the gods.

From "Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse

In a compassionate but nuanced telling, the novel effectively effaces assumptions of superiority and inferiority, good and bad.

From New York Times ● Aug. 5, 2021

Most essentially, “Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through,” not unlike Fleischmann’s first book “Syzygy, Beauty,” effaces lines of genre as a strategy to efface, or disrupt, lines of self and gender.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 5, 2019

Indeed, each film effaces the collective aspects of the assassination research by presenting the historiographic challenges of the period as essentially the work of one man.

From Slate ● Jul. 21, 2017

It’s an enormous story, one that, in the telling, nearly effaces Wilkerson’s presence onstage.

From The New Yorker ● Mar. 8, 2017

Keats does not hesitate to draw a moral even from his Grecian Urn, and even in the very climacteric of his most "high sorrowful" song; and that moral effaces the distinction between truth and beauty.

From The English Novel And the Principle of its Development by Sidney Lanier

If anything, I think he speaks to an aspect of Silicon Valley that maybe has been effaced more recently—it’s not our popular image of the industry today, where it’s something much more malign.

From Slate ● Aug. 15, 2025

But that timing dates back to when broadcast television dominated — both in viewership and Emmys contenders — in a way that has been effaced by cable television and streaming services.

From Seattle Times ● Aug. 10, 2023

And the shutdown is also an opening to acknowledge society's dependence on care giving labor and confront the ways this work — in families, schools, retirement communities — has been disparaged, effaced and desperately under-compensated.

From Salon ● May 29, 2021

Los Angeles, which has largely effaced its Mexican past, likes to pretend it doesn’t have much history.

From New York Times ● Apr. 24, 2020

João de Barros was able to claim in 1555 that Hercules’ pillars, ‘which he set up at our very doorstep, as it were,...have been effaced from human memory and thrust into silence and oblivion’.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

Classical realism is sometimes accused of effacing its own literary labor; the cost of Tokarczuk’s flâneurial freedom is that it effaces the labor of travel.

From The New Yorker ● Sep. 24, 2018

Apart from all this, maybe the most potent force effacing gay culture is an understandable, if still covert, impulse to jettison the trauma of the queer legacy.

From Slate ● Jun. 25, 2018

A versatile stage veteran best known for her Emmy-winning performance as Jackie on “Roseanne,” Metcalf has the ability to fully inhabit a comic universe without effacing more difficult human truth.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 27, 2017

For as long as humans have lived with symbols we have created strategies for effacing or revaluing them.

From Washington Post ● Aug. 6, 2015

Then I saw a shadow flit across her face, and she drew back against the wall, effacing herself, as a step sounded outside and Maxim came into the room.

From "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier