Yet too often the language of law is deadeningly formal and painfully abstract.

Engaging with Joyce's work as a textual game, with hidden clues and meanings to be discovered everywhere and in everything, suggests that Dubliners is best appreciated as being deadeningly deliberate.

Having been introduced to the exhibition by display cases containing documents from Pamela Bannos's research-based excavation of the museum's own site, Shifting Grounds: Block 21 and Chicago's MCA, 2013, and then shepherded into the first gallery by Mark Dion's deadeningly literal re-creation of an archaeologist's work space, Concerning the Dig, 2013, the visitor should get the point.

Perhaps you're now inclined to give a little more emphasis to Bourdieu's ideas about the 'weight of the world'--which, I know, can sound like a terribly oppressive and deadeningly deterministic position, but nonetheless, evidently has a very important sense to it.

Cellini's own position is that wandering away from his profession actually made him a better artisan, and Ashbee's position is that Cellini's narrative digressions reveal the wider life of the cinquecento craftsman as a vital alternative to the deadeningly "subdivided" labor of the industrial age.

The sculpture has been denounced by some art historians and culture mavens as boring and "deadeningly somber," and maligned by gay activists as too conservative a depiction of homosexual affection.