Silent treatment

to give someone the silent treatment

Finally we gave him the silent treatment, and for weeks before he died we neither spoke to him nor did he speak to us.

We met one woman who had been given the silent treatment by her husband for 40 years. If the silent treatment becomes a longstanding pattern, you lose self-esteem and perspective.

So sailors used a tried technique to deal with an offender: the silent treatment. They would ignore him completely for weeks on end. That might sound like an innocuous action to you, but in truth, it was far from it. The silent treatment was, according to the writer Otis Ferguson in 1944, “a process so effective in the monotony of ship’s life as to make strong men weep.”