Bulverize

English

Verb

Bulverize (third-person singular simple present Bulverizes, present participle Bulverizing, simple past and past participle Bulverized)

1. (transitive) To subject (an opponent) in a debate) to Bulverism ("a rhetorical fallacy in which a speaker assumes that their opponent's argument is wrong, and instead of disproving it, condescendingly explains why their opponent would have come to that conclusion").
   • 2017, Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, New York, N.Y.: Currency, →ISBN, page 83:

     We might recall here Roger Scruton's commendation of taking "a negotiating posture towards the other'—to do that, I think, is to cease to see a person as "the other" but rather as "my neighbor." And when you do that, it becomes harder to Bulverize that person, to treat him or her as so obviously wrong that no debate is required, only mockery.