To make something seem less important or less serious than it really is. It is a transitive verb — you trivialize something — and it is always a complaint. The commonest objects are suffering and serious subjects: to trivialize an illness, a war, someone's grief, a crime, a whole profession. How does a person trivialize something? Usually not by lying, but by the treatment: making a joke of it, using it to sell a product, boiling it down to a slogan, or comparing it with something small ("calling a bad phone signal 'torture' trivializes torture"). That last pattern — X trivializes Y — is one of the most frequent shapes the word takes in modern argument. Two useful cautions. First, the accusation is often about effect, not intention: people trivialize things without meaning to, and "I didn't mean it that way" is not usually accepted as a defence. Second, spelling: British writers normally use `trivialise`, Americans `trivializ e` — pick one and stay with it. The register is formal-ish; in ordinary speech people say "don't make light of it" or "you're making it sound like nothing".

淡化、把…說得無關緊要