What's the difference between stultify and useless?

Stultify


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To make foolish; to make a fool of; as, to stultify one by imposition; to stultify one's self by silly reasoning or conduct.
  • (v. t.) To regard as a fool, or as foolish.
  • (v. t.) To allege or prove to be of unsound mind, so that the performance of some act may be avoided.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The loud ties, hideous jumpers, bottles of Drambuie, dubious perfumes and aftershaves, second copies of DVDs, panettones and stultifying board games are all an extension of that.
  • (2) Their 'hipster' children who have only ever lived through the era of neo-con politics find these environments stultifying and conventional and long for something more edgy, urban and cool-'authentic' places where poor folk live, that make them feel daring and adventurous.
  • (3) His first novel, Five Point Someone , adopted a breezy, ironic tone to explore the lives of the exam-oppressed students who cram to get into the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and then rebel against the stultifying atmosphere of academic competition.
  • (4) We are social animals, surely, and, though lives may have been relatively mundane (for which sometimes read stultifying) back pre-70s, when we traditionally met, within the same postal district, the ever-same dysfunctional relatives three nights a week to… fold knitted paper or imitate the cry of the ibis or some such, at least someone would have been able to tell when you'd had a stroke.
  • (5) They created their own fashion, a reaction to the stultified West End theatre.
  • (6) "If Cliff Thorburn was in his stultifying pomp now, would he still be known as 'The Grinder', or as 'The Matchplayer'?"
  • (7) In the end, writing about what you know – that hoary and potentially limiting, even stultifying piece of advice – might be best seen as applying to the type of story you're thinking of writing rather than to the details of what happens within it and perhaps, with that in mind, a better precept might be to write about what you love, rather than what you have a degree of contempt for but will deign to lower yourself to, just to show the rest of us how it's done.
  • (8) I don't think it will work, even though there are older people who would prefer Britain to return to the emotionally stultifying era of their youth.
  • (9) Many are fearful though of that consensus and its potentially stultifying consequences.
  • (10) That would have the effect of stultifying attempts to operate a range of schemes to meet particular needs."
  • (11) China's film industry, while growing, is burdened by a stultifying bureaucracy and draconian censorship.
  • (12) Today, it's hard to imagine the jolt these records must have delivered to a teenage audience stultified by what was previously on offer: their impact has been dulled by 50 years of ubiquity.
  • (13) The reason is the feeling in jazz that if you print something, if you write down the notes, you will stultify the music.
  • (14) "Look at all the kites," I said as we passed Chaoyang park, even though my heart sank at the tatty buildings, endless construction sites and stultifying haze.
  • (15) In our own society recent reorientation towards a traditional type fatalism and a de-emphasis on the Puritan work ethic reflects a marked value shift which may stultify many, much as it fosters increased individualization among others.
  • (16) Of course, this is stultifyingly obvious in some respects: if you don't want your children to be influenced by advertising, don't let them watch hours of ads.
  • (17) Spain has travelled light years since Franco died, ending 40 years of stultifying dictatorship.
  • (18) Even from a pragmatic standpoint, consider which scenario is more likely: that a famous, powerful man – raised in a world where women are characterised as passive, decorative “rewards” for male success – used his position to groom vulnerable young women in the same way that countless men have done before him; or that 15 complete strangers randomly crossed paths and decided to concoct a conspiracy to frame a universally loved actor for rape, knowing that it would result in years of intrusive investigations, stultifying bureaucracy and brutal character assassinations?
  • (19) It's a wonderful, liberating break from that infantile, stultifying convention.
  • (20) Similarly, by sentencing the Palestinian child to life in a small, stultified village with no means for development, the plan keeps the child from being aware of all the opportunities available to any other person.

Useless


Definition:

  • (a.) Having, or being of, no use; unserviceable; producing no good end; answering no valuable purpose; not advancing the end proposed; unprofitable; ineffectual; as, a useless garment; useless pity.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Theoretical findings on sterilization and disinfection measures are useless for the dental practice if their efficiency is put into question due to insufficient consideration of the special conditions of dental treatment.
  • (2) It’s useless if we try and fight with them through force, so we try and fight with them through humour.” “There is a saying that laughing is the best form of medicine.
  • (3) It also seems to be a bit useless as a way of gathering intelligence.
  • (4) It is concluded that the femoral stem should be as thick as possible and that the collar of the prosthesis is useless.
  • (5) The clorus water disinfecting conventional methods by many reasons are useless, even in urbanized cities.
  • (6) By now seemingly every print and online outlet has had a crack at explaining why the Sunday shows are so phenomenally useless.
  • (7) He added: "Why on earth is this useless Goverment pandering to Puffs?
  • (8) It’s great that the new Star Wars film is more diverse , with John Boyega and Daisy Ridley in significant roles; I am pleased to see everyone on #BoycottStarWarsVII gnash and whine uselessly.
  • (9) Inappropriate, useless and potentially harmful surgical diagnostic procedures are also avoided.
  • (10) However, under normal working conditions, taking into account the period of time which inevitably elapses between the patient feeling pain in the kidney and his reaching the Emergency Department and the necessary examinations being carried out which enable the correct diagnosis to be made, the number of hours which have passed make attempts at conservative surgery completely useless.
  • (11) However one should not ask for the impossible of the treatment of male infertility since the most optimal seminal analysis result is useless in the presence of a monophysic menstrual cycle in the partner.
  • (12) The endoscopic retrograde cholangiography is of greatest practical significance for the differential diagnosis of the cholestatic icterus: non-obstructed bile ducts exclude an extrahepatic icterus and render a laparotomy useless.
  • (13) If you have a regulator behaving this uselessly, I suspect MPs will start saying this is not regulation," he said.
  • (14) The importance of a diagnosis before surgery by cytopunction and drill-biopsy has to be emphasized, to prevent an useless mastectomy.
  • (15) In conclusion, excepted for pituitary deficiency, basal plasma TSH (IRMA) levels are accurate and sufficient in the evaluation of the thyroid function and make the TRH-test useless.
  • (16) (4) The annual vaccination campaigns since 1970 against FMD were useless because most of the primary outbreaks of FMD since then can be traced to the production or the application of vaccines.
  • (17) A hepatic lesion regarded as useless for the ultimate diagnosis was present in 16 cases (14.5 per cent).
  • (18) Talking this week to several, I heard the same story of exorbitant fees and shocking interest rates throttling real production, while Adair Turner's "socially useless" financial products attract limitless bubble credit.
  • (19) Clinical evaluation and laboratory tests are useless.
  • (20) The Chinese government is depicted as benevolent, while the US government manages to be both sinister and useless – typified by the black-clad CIA operatives, one of whom gets beaten up by a Chinese character.

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