reify

The brain latches on or compares itself to others, starting a negative cycle of thinking that can reify itself.

From Seattle Times ● Jan. 1, 2024

They ask critical questions about colleges as sites that perpetuate classism, places that not only reify hierarchies of value but rely on it as part of their mythology.

From Salon ● Jul. 31, 2021

We can use the mythology of the frontier, he writes, “to reify our nostalgia for a falsely idealized past,” or we can use it as a way of “imagining and speaking truth.”

From New York Times ● Dec. 21, 2017

And that, in turn, their worth was meaningless without a man or a corporation to reify it.

From The Guardian ● Feb. 22, 2016

Markets reify this contribution, turning life, energy, doubts, time, or whatever else-in particular language-into the commodity embodied in the product.

From The Civilization of Illiteracy by Nadin, Mihai

The babydoll dress has a long and complex history, one that’s been associated with women’s sartorial freedom as much as it’s reified their cultural infantilization.

From Salon ● Jun. 12, 2026

We play by a code of conduct, that nebulous thing we have reified as “international law.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 8, 2025

Each count, Mr Teltumbde argues, "did not merely record caste, but reified and hardened it".

From BBC ● Nov. 12, 2025

We see this push for closure reified across American culture.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 26, 2024

Writing became the medium through which some human experiences were reified.

From The Civilization of Illiteracy by Nadin, Mihai

There is a difference, albeit a subtle one, between erasing one class of people while reifying another, and mocking the entire project of balancing genuine, and competing interests.

From Slate ● Dec. 5, 2022

Based off the conventions and what exists in the world in terms of cyborgian narratives, I wanted to contribute something that isn’t reifying those projects.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 29, 2022

Her style of hyperlinking in real time matches the hybrid way she works, reifying, refining and recollecting the thoughts that make a person up.

From New York Times ● Sep. 2, 2022

Rather than reifying 1776 or 1787, “reflective patriotism” addresses questions about who was denied full rights in the polity.

From Slate ● Jun. 23, 2021

But this latter view is precisely the error of extreme realism, of reifying abstract concepts and holding the “universale a parte rei”: a theory which leads logically to monism.143 31.

From Ontology or the Theory of Being by Coffey, Peter