stultify

Not for Gardiner the pietistically devotional approach that can stultify.

From New York Times ● Mar. 31, 2022

Now, that can stultify a pope, in which neutrality becomes an end in itself.

From Salon ● Mar. 21, 2015

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

Marks of reticence are on all those faces: lips shut, eyes shaded, each one of the five doing something to hide or stultify his knowledge.

From Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf

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

Many at The Post had become frustrated with what they viewed as a stultified business culture over which Mr. Ryan presided, and had relayed these concerns to Ms. Buzbee.

From New York Times ● Jul. 22, 2023

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

That changes a mystery which stultified and contradicted the best we knew into a mystery which teaches, allures, elevates; which harmonizes what we know with what we hope.

From The Letters of Anne Gilchrist and Walt Whitman by Anne Burrows Gilchrist

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

“What are these? Visual aids for civics or some other equally stultifying high school subject?”

From "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole