memory-hole

plural memory-holes

1. alternativeAlternative form of memory hole.

present singular third person memory-holes · participle present memory-holing · participle past memory-holed · past memory-holed

1. transitiveTo cause something or someone to be forgotten.

   […] since the stage was a classic and had been around a long time, most people still called it by its original and now memory-holed name.

   2009, Stephen Hunter, I, Sniper: A Bob Lee Swagger Novel, page 458

   4 more examples

   His response, supported by Vasilevsky and Khrushchev, presented a highly embellished account that mollified the Vozhd and was memory-holed by a subsequent field performance solid enough to bring Rotmistrov assignment as deputy commander of Red Army armored and mechanized forces in November 1944.

   2013, Dennis E. Showalter, Armor and Blood: The Battle of Kursk: The Turning Point of World War II, page 164

   It's possible that the New York Times memory-holed the Pastor Giglio paragraph on its own, without any pressure from the Obama White House. That seems unlikely since it was done in violation of the Times' own policy.

   2018, Michael Youssef, The Hidden Enemy: Aggressive Secularism, Radical Islam, and the Fight for Our Future, page 105

   But at a moment when the Democratic Party wants to memory-hole calls to defund the police, some who were once turned off by Harris’s record as a prosecutor are thrilling to her law-and-order case against Trump.

   2024 August 2, Michelle Goldberg, “Don’t Listen to the Right. The Kamalanomenon Is Real.”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

   The administration isn’t even pretending that it forced China to pay any special price for its defiance. It is memory-holing the entire “do not retaliate” episode and moving on as if the point this whole time was to get along better with Beijing.

   2025 May 12, Jonathan Chait, “China Called Trump’s Bluff”, in The Atlantic