What is "coarsen"

Usage examples of "coarsen".

She was so fine that McLain's ugliness hadn't been able to coarsen her.

To coarsen her voice for when she did have to talk, she had forced herself to cough enough to irritate her throat.

The intent of the lyricist, obviously, was to so coarsen the feelings of males who sang the song that the singers could never believe again what most of us believed with all our hearts back then: that women were more spiritual, more sacred than men.

She packed them off to Trinity College School in Port Hope, where Benjamin and his machinery couldn’t coarsen them.

She hadn't given up on her little efforts toward beauty, though now they seemed to coarsen rather than dignify her.

He had the picture clear before his eyes, he saw it in the flame of the lamp at which he gazed so steadily—an old, wizened, shrunken woman, living in a bare room, friendless and solitary, so old that she had even ceased to be aware of her unhappiness, and so coarsened out of all likeness to the young, bright English girl who had once dwelt in Cawnpore, that even her own countryman had hardly believed she was of his race.

He was a perfectionist, and he believed his mind was perfect, but a thing was blunted and coarsened as soon as it was made: pure thought could not be transformed into matter, and nothing could be brought to perfection.

Not long ago he had her lovely solemn faceMoura thought of it as her mother's facebut this past year, the onset of his late adolescence, had coarsened it.

He was tall like Fizzy, he had Fizzy's fleshy lips and narrow bonesand even this wilderness had not coarsened his hands.

Motorcycle gangs from Olcott Beach, and Erie, Pennsylvania, with straggly greasy hair, beards and black leather and swastika tattoos whose leaders, photographed for the Buffalo News, resembled older, coarsened brothers of John Reddy Heart.

The fine grained skin which should have been delicate and firm had coarsened also and upon close inspection showed multitudes of tiny lines.

Deep russet, once strawberry blond but coarsened now by age and the incursion of rebellious wiry silver hairs, a tangle of curls ran riot over the pillow.

Like the roses exploding on the ends of their coarsened and darkened stems and the leaves with so many points and tiny veins to them.

But their high intelligence could not be shared except by the slow, impersonal, and imprecise spoken language, and a true meeting of minds was possible only during the brief period between the initial linkup and the coarsening and confusion of intellect which immediately followed it.

There is a coarsening, a lack in the more subtle shading and structuring of their emotions, as if the finer and, for want of a better word to describe it to a non-empath, more civilized feelings are being stripped away.