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

Where dramatists in training waste their nervous energy and often stultify their best desires is in keeping critical tab upon themselves as they create.

From Dramatic Technique by George Pierce Baker

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

Where it succeeds most is in its insistence on the cosmopolitanism and dynamism of the countryside — where things can happen faster, and ambitions can be greater, than in the stultified cities of the West.

From New York Times ● Nov. 5, 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

Jenny's sensibility had not been stultified by these emotional ills, so that when he crossed her horizon, she loved him sanely without prejudice.

From Carnival by Compton MacKenzie

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

Aiding this descent is Lennert Hillege’s cinematography, coolly observant of confining darkness and stultifying daylight, not quite naturalism and not quite noir.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 10, 2025

Although their poverty was traditional and stultifying, it was not unique.

From "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison