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

We find that if we do not neglect or stultify any portion of our nature, our insight grows.

From What and Where is God? A Human Answer to the Deep Religious Cry of the Modern Soul by Swain, Richard la Rue

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

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

After all, as he told himself, the atmosphere of Throgmorton Street had probably stultified his outlook.

From The Passionate Elopement by MacKenzie, Compton

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

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

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

From BBC ● Aug. 14, 2024

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

From "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller