stultify

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

But after a while Mr. Yeston’s tuneful feast begins to satiate and eventually stultify, and by the evening’s end it’s as if you’d eaten a whole buffet of pastry.

From New York Times ● Jul. 22, 2011

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

He would not stultify his own proceedings, and declare that everything which he had done was wrong.

From Marion Fay by Anthony Trollope

In the last section, Elvis is stultified and oppressed, sapped of color and life, isolated in his “golden cage” at the International Hotel in Vegas.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 23, 2022

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

But the fact that so many singers of her stature hew to the standard repertory suggests how stultified the world of opera has become since the days when Puccini’s operas took the world by storm.

From New York Times ● Jan. 9, 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

The setting needn’t be explicitly Norway, but the stultifying strictures of this middle-class world must be in place for Ibsen’s vision to have its detonating effect.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 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

He sat mutely in a ponderous, stultifying melancholy, waiting expectantly for Corporal Whitcomb to walk back in.

From "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller