That will surely stultify debate about the proper role of the law in America hardly a trivial matter in the most legalistic society on earth.
To Kaufman, we are carved out and beaten down by a consumer society; how he might apply his wits to a developing nation, say, whose citizens strive to ease, rather than stultify, their lives with goods and services, I cannot imagine.
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.
So when this cafeteria culture hits the big city, does the collision somehow stultify economic activity?
Even William Gross of Pimco, a vocal critic of the long-term fiscal position of the government, cautions that a move toward fiscal balance, if implemented too quickly, could "stultify economic growth".
And design culture will stultify unless it reflects society as a whole.
Without that lending, an economy can quickly stultify.
They are vast blocs of unaccountable private power; and the more they advance into the central areas of public life, the more they stultify the ways in which we talk to each other and think about our place in the world, on this little patch of overburden we call home.
Without dissent, without protest, without discussion, without debate, democracy will stultify; democracy will die".
In other words, work is not to bore and stultify us, but nourish and develop.
In remembering it, perhaps he can be spared the fate of his hero Orwell, who, he said, needed to be extricated from "a pile of saccharin tablets and moist hankies; an object of sickly veneration and sentimental overpraise, employed to stultify schoolchildren with his insufferable rightness and purity".
