efface

"You may have the power to bring down the government. But you cannot efface reality," he said.

From BBC ● Sep. 8, 2025

Clichés like these efface the complications of real relationships.

From New York Times ● Apr. 21, 2020

The wind that exposed the ancient buildings now promises to efface them altogether in a short time.

From Washington Post ● Oct. 3, 2019

Most essentially, “Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through,” not unlike Fleischmann’s first book “Syzygy, Beauty,” effaces lines of genre as a strategy to efface, or disrupt, lines of self and gender.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 5, 2019

There was nothing more for him but to efface himself, to destroy the unsuccessful structure of his life, to throw it away, mocked at by the gods.

From "Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse

His celebrated merchant posters, made from local advertisements that he salvages from his neighborhood and then effaces so that multiple layers surface simultaneously, tell a history of predation via something as commonplace as payday-loan advertisements.

From New York Times ● Apr. 19, 2023

But some may feel that the warm welcome Omar receives from the enslaved workers at Owen’s plantation effaces the harsher reality of the character’s circumstance.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 23, 2022

Classical realism is sometimes accused of effacing its own literary labor; the cost of Tokarczuk’s flâneurial freedom is that it effaces the labor of travel.

From The New Yorker ● Sep. 24, 2018

Indeed, each film effaces the collective aspects of the assassination research by presenting the historiographic challenges of the period as essentially the work of one man.

From Slate ● Jul. 21, 2017

Whitman decries culture only so far as it cuts a man off from his fellows, clips away or effaces the sweet, native, healthy parts of him, and begets a bloodless, superstitious, infidelistic class.

From Whitman A Study by John Burroughs

Such weird scenes inside this once-mysterious world have been totally effaced, now that every musician can curate his own image on social media.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 27, 2025

If anything, I think he speaks to an aspect of Silicon Valley that maybe has been effaced more recently—it’s not our popular image of the industry today, where it’s something much more malign.

From Slate ● Aug. 15, 2025

And while Fargeat is not very subtle showing Elisabeth literally being effaced from a billboard, illustrating this very point, the emotional toll is palpable.

From Salon ● Sep. 20, 2024

But that timing dates back to when broadcast television dominated — both in viewership and Emmys contenders — in a way that has been effaced by cable television and streaming services.

From Seattle Times ● Aug. 10, 2023

João de Barros was able to claim in 1555 that Hercules’ pillars, ‘which he set up at our very doorstep, as it were,...have been effaced from human memory and thrust into silence and oblivion’.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

These animals, the creation of inspired puppet designer Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell, are fluidly deployed by a team of graceful puppeteers, who preserve the essential dignity of these creatures without effacing their ferocity.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 9, 2025

Adolfo became an expert at effacing the most stubborn stains.

From New York Times ● Jan. 9, 2023

Classical realism is sometimes accused of effacing its own literary labor; the cost of Tokarczuk’s flâneurial freedom is that it effaces the labor of travel.

From The New Yorker ● Sep. 24, 2018

Apart from all this, maybe the most potent force effacing gay culture is an understandable, if still covert, impulse to jettison the trauma of the queer legacy.

From Slate ● Jun. 25, 2018

Then I saw a shadow flit across her face, and she drew back against the wall, effacing herself, as a step sounded outside and Maxim came into the room.

From "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier