Word of the Day

: December 19, 2017

stultify

verb STUL-tuh-fye

What It Means

1 : to cause to appear or be stupid, foolish, or absurdly illogical

2 a : to impair, invalidate, or make ineffective : negate 

b : to have a dulling or inhibiting effect on

stultify in Context

What started out as a promising plan to redesign the town square ended up being stultified by bureaucracy and too many conflicting special interests.

"But I have found the capacity to block off certain thoughts. Like, with this film, about the scale of it or how people loved the Potter films and what's at stake and not wanting to screw it up. I'm getting better at blocking that part of my head because it can stultify you." — Eddie Redmayne, quoted in The Straits Times (Singapore), 16 Nov. 2016

Did You Know?

Stupid or absurd behavior can be almost laughable at times. That's the kind of situation depicted in an 1871 London Daily News article, describing how a witness "stultified himself" by admitting that he was too far off to hear what he had claimed to have heard. But there is nothing especially funny about the now-archaic original usage of stultify. The word was first used in the mid-1700s in legal contexts, where if you stultified yourself, you claimed to be of unsound mind and thus not responsible for your acts. Nor is there humor in the most common meaning of stultify nowadays, that of rendering someone or something useless or ineffective.