stultify

Not for Gardiner the pietistically devotional approach that can stultify.

From New York Times ● Mar. 31, 2022

He puts the yawn into stultify, the stupefy into catatonia, stone-facedly delivering the exact same chords, licks, and nasal delivery for over three decades over a backbeat that would have lost the Boer War.

From Salon ● Jul. 11, 2012

So when this cafeteria culture hits the big city, does the collision somehow stultify economic activity? Cities, after all, need people out on the sidewalks.

From New York Times ● Jul. 2, 2011

The reason is the feeling in jazz that if you print something, if you write down the notes, you will stultify the music.

From The Guardian ● Aug. 12, 2010

Life in the factory served to stunt the growth and stultify the intellect of those who did not possess, like himself, that piercing, that vitalizing determination to keep looking upwards.

From Capricious Caroline by Effie Adelaide Rowlands

Gems include a rant on critics, the assertion that the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing and how writing helped alleviate his stultified misery after a near-death car accident.

From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 14, 2025

Now they had been moved to this motel with its shared toilets and atmosphere of stultified trauma.

From New York Times ● Aug. 4, 2020

All these lessons leave me stultified; The hours in the day just drag along — I think they’ve multiplied!

From Washington Post ● Apr. 30, 2020

The stultified senators should distract themselves with dice cricket, a game beloved by indoorsy British children.

From Slate ● Jan. 23, 2020

That changes a mystery which stultified and contradicted the best we knew into a mystery which teaches, allures, elevates; which harmonizes what we know with what we hope.

From The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman by Anne Burrows Gilchrist

When I walked into the arcade, I experienced a feeling I’d stuffed down into my subconscious for decades: the stultifying awkwardness of a middle school dance.

From Slate ● Jun. 25, 2026

For Jews, the stultifying fact to be faced is that antisemitism has nothing to do with Jews.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 21, 2025

Because of the SSA’s stultifying culture, Dudek said, he leaned into his insubordinate streak.

From Salon ● Sep. 9, 2025

In Lebanon, the stultifying heat of summer is overlaid by a layer of anxiety.

From BBC ● Aug. 14, 2024

The pervasive emptiness and stultifying summer heat were only minor deterrents when compared with the more elemental consideration that all the banking and commercial institutions were based elsewhere, chiefly in Philadelphia and New York.

From "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation" by Joseph J. Ellis