inanimate

What to do with this inanimate object, whose newly visible rust spots Ms. Wilson began to equate with the cracks she had failed to discern in her marriage?

He amassed around 3,000 inanimate objects, which he started collecting after his father’s death.

That’s to say, where rivers are recognised as alive, enlivening presences in story, art and law, rather than –– as Isaac Newton put it –– ‘brute inanimate matter’.

Driven or driverless, the car is the most animated of inanimate objects, sometimes literally a cartoon, with a voice, a personality, a name.

The power of the waltz here is how it humanizes the space station as it’s about to be taken over by an inanimate AI, namely the computer called HAL.