How to Use totemic in a Sentence

totemic

adjective

• As a totemic figure of doom, though, Donahue fills the bill.
  — Paul Hodgins, Orange County Register, 29 Jan. 2017
• The point of the new biopic mode was to reveal totemic figures in a more complex way.
  — Owen Gleiberman, Variety, 8 Feb. 2024
• The days of the totemic home phone number are vanishing.
  — Eric Zorn, chicagotribune.com, 1 Dec. 2020
• Gone is the idea of a totemic strand of DNA that extends 6 feet when uncoiled and stretched out in a straight line.
  — Elie Dolgin, BostonGlobe.com, 10 May 2023
• One piece, the totemic Big Lamp, combines marble and stone in the base, while a textured palm-fiber shade brings softness to the form.
  — Rachel Gallaher, Robb Report, 25 Feb. 2024
• But Ludwig Göransson’s Oppenheimer score feels like the most totemic of the bunch.
  — Nate Jones, Vulture, 4 Jan. 2024
• For You—the totemic pounding drums, the shout-it-out-loud anthemic choruses, and yeah: those guitars.
  — Liam Hess, Vogue, 23 Oct. 2023
• Chances that growth will slow further, or the yuan will sink below the totemic level of seven to the dollar—or both—are rising.
  — Nathaniel Taplin, WSJ, 10 June 2019
• The last few years have not been easy for the totemic figures of American history, caught in the crossfire of our culture wars.
  — Washington Post, 15 Apr. 2022
• And there is the Instagram phenomenon of certain white ones taking on the totemic allure of the Parthenon.
  — Julie Lasky, ELLE Decor, 27 Apr. 2022
• The Olympics have been delayed, and the same increasingly likely to happen to Johnson's own totemic project.
  — Edward Evans, Bloomberg.com, 10 May 2020
• But this is not at all the Bergé known in France, where the collector and businessman is a towering, even totemic, figure.
  — James McAuley, Town & Country, 8 Sep. 2017
• That cycle will now take place in five programs over the coming months, with most of these totemic works preceded by shorter new pieces.
  — New York Times, 7 Oct. 2021
• In turn, this letter attracted protest from some younger party members, for whom trans rights are totemic.
  — The Economist, 5 July 2018
• The books themselves resemble, as much as anything, the totemic novels of the midcentury.
  — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 7 Dec. 2021
• The Trib was known as a writer’s paper, and while there Wolfe made forays beyond totemic somnambulism.
  — Ben Yagoda, WSJ, 18 May 2018
• In a break in play, Dalic summoned Modric, Croatia’s totemic captain, to the sideline.
  — Rory Smith, New York Times, 13 Dec. 2022
• One gallery sporting dozens of small works perched on steel pedestals evokes everything from Picasso to Brancusi to the totemic forms of ancient cultures.
  — BostonGlobe.com, 13 May 2021
• Through Hsiung’s camera, its components become totemic, almost erotic: the tapered neck of the artichoke, the smooth flesh of the fish.
  — Helen Rosner, The New Yorker, 17 Mar. 2021
• Wandsworth and Westminster, two totemic Tory councils, did not fall, despite Labour’s noisy campaigns in both.
  — The Economist, 4 May 2018
• So wrote Henry David Thoreau, famously, in Walden, the totemic 19th-century ode to downscale, off-the-grid living.
  — Tom Vanderbilt, Outside Online, 28 Mar. 2023
• The repeal of that provision has been a totemic issue to Hindu nationalists for decades.
  — The Economist, 9 Aug. 2019
• And Haley, knowing its totemic importance to Tyler also, runs off with it —this sacred object.
  — Kate Aurthur, Variety, 13 Jan. 2022
• Such was its totemic power that a more inclusive version of the three words — all lives matter — was considered a dangerous heresy.
  — Rich Lowry, National Review, 22 Feb. 2022
• Adjacent to the pavilion are six totemic sculptures: 10-foot tall railroad frogs cast in manganese steel anchored upright.
  — R. Daniel Foster, Forbes, 22 Jan. 2023
• At the same time, the project has totemic significance in Australia as a proxy for the fight between environmentalists and coal miners.
  — Washington Post, 20 Sep. 2019
• The Last Dance underscores that Jordan was one of the last truly monocultural figures of the pre-internet era, totemic and inscrutable.
  — Alex Shephard, The New Republic, 24 Apr. 2020
• In the conversation of my parents and their theater-going friends, Hecht popped up as a familiar, almost totemic presence.
  — Geoffrey O’Brien, The New York Review of Books, 18 Apr. 2019
• Two mighty mahogany doors (salvaged from Trout’s father’s home, lost after Hurricane Harvey), act as totemic portals to the chic wine atelier.
  — Greg Morago, Houston Chronicle, 17 Jan. 2020
• The stethoscope, medicine’s most totemic object, had faced similar obstacles.
  — Clifford Marks, The New Yorker, 20 Jan. 2023

Last Updated: 21 Aug 2024