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

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

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

The finest cutting machine unintelligently operated will stultify the best efforts of the printing plant.

From Paper-Cutting Machines A Primer of Information about Paper and Card Trimmers, Hand-Lever Cutters, Power Cutters and Other Automatic Machines for Cutting Paper (Typographic Technical Series Part 1, No. 10) by David Grayson

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

Now they had been moved to this motel with its shared toilets and atmosphere of stultified trauma.

From New York Times ● Aug. 4, 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

Not only would you fail to do anything real for the people, but you yourself would be stultified.

From The Everlasting Arms by Joseph Hocking

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

In reality, the most powerful force in the modern American city is the stultifying status quo.

From Slate ● Sep. 16, 2024

I worked in a Wall Street mailroom and finally found a job in the post office from which I was fired because I could no longer stand the stultifying work.

From "Bad Boy" by Walter Dean Myers