coarsen

"If we are interested in the distribution of small-scale objects, we have to work against this natural tendency for things to coarsen," Bellon explains.

From Science Daily ● Sep. 20, 2023

It’s not just that they coarsen the culture, though that’s bad enough.

From Seattle Times ● Nov. 21, 2021

It’s a progressive degeneration from pop culture to further dumb down and coarsen our popular taste.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 26, 2019

But it also adds new incidents, characters and depth, with a contemporary wit that doesn’t coarsen the story — or not much, anyway.

From Washington Post ● Dec. 13, 2017

‘Motherogod! She’s not but four. It’s liable to scare her. And besides, permanents tend to coarsen the hair.’

From "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" by Carson McCullers

But there is nothing better about this “Cat Person,” which coarsens, flattens and torturously over-elaborates a story whose elegant concision was precisely what made it such rich and elastic interpretive fodder.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 22, 2023

Even as Twitter frays and coarsens under Musk’s ownership, it’s still possible to have fun with others, one of the few things that keeps users from leaving.

From New York Times ● Jan. 20, 2023

It coarsens public discourse, distracts from the real issues and prevents solutions.

From Washington Times ● Nov. 14, 2017

It erases nuance, coarsens thought, turns into a game of “Telephone” in which original meaning becomes hopelessly garbled with every successive retweet.

From Seattle Times ● Jun. 26, 2017

It is concealment which misleads and coarsens, producing a state of mind in which even the Bible becomes a stimulus to the senses.

From Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 Sex in Relation to Society by Ellis, Havelock

In today’s coarsened climate, fretting about rules of politeness seems futile.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 23, 2026

And Crawford, his flinty good looks partly hidden by a dark beard and coarsened by the cold Utah air, all but buries David in an inchoate weave of jealousy, confusion and fury.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 13, 2021

“Hasn’t our national debate been coarsened enough, and shouldn’t we appreciate the old-school attributes of somebody like Bob Mueller, who declined to engage in hand-to-hand combat with 140 characters?” asked Sandick.

From The Guardian ● Jun. 11, 2019

They are far enough from childhood to be fully formed but not yet coarsened by adulthood, as delicate of limb and feature as mantelpiece figurines.

From New York Times ● Jan. 30, 2018

Her skin had coarsened, tanned from all the time they were spending in the yard sitting beneath the brazen sun.

From "A Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini

The coarsening and outright collapse of public standards this millennium is so astonishing that it is hard to describe the world back then to “digital natives.”

From MarketWatch ● Jun. 23, 2026

In her recent New York Times article about the "coarsening" of the religious right, Ruth Graham alluded to this, writing about the trend of evangelical leaders using "vulgarities."

From Salon ● Apr. 1, 2024

In such a case, the suppression of coarsening would be beneficial.

From Science Daily ● Sep. 20, 2023

The threats are not simply an issue of coarsening of the national discourse.

From Seattle Times ● Aug. 11, 2023

Now he was used to such things, a roadside commonplace, but back then, before the coarsening and general numbness, when it was a novelty and when everything was new, he felt it sharply.

From "Atonement" by Ian McEwan