desanctify
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English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Verb
[edit]desanctify (third-person singular simple present desanctifies, present participle desanctifying, simple past and past participle desanctified)
- To remove the sanctified status of.
- 1991 September 22, Alan Trachtenberg, “UNIVERSITY PRESSES; Shaping America's Dreams in Chicago”, in The New York Times[1]:
- His utopias aren't "nowhere" -- counterfactual examples of how things might be in order to desanctify how things actually are.
- 1997 August, Martin Buber, Israel and the World[2], page 178:
- Christianity desanctifies these in a positive sense by rendering them subservient to an entirely different kind of holiness.
- 2008, Jennifer Summit, Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England, page 170:
- In so doing, he transforms the Foxian compulsion to distinguish true martyrs from false ones —and thus to differentiate his own saint-making project from medieval hagiography—into a model of textual criticism, directed at detecting and desanctifying the false martyr through the critical medium of marginalia.
- 2009 October 29, Randy Cohen, “Our Home Was a Bawdy House”, in The New York Times Magazine[3]:
- What qualifies? Anything that could significantly influence your deciding whether to rent the place — low-flying jets, overflowing drains or desanctified brothels.
Synonyms
[edit]- desacralize, desecrate, unconsecrate; see also Thesaurus:desecrate
Related terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]to desanctify
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