Re: can't turn off font-lock

[Richard Stallman]

    Meanwhile, I have also never been able to figure out how to disable an
    individual face (and could find no documentation about it, either).  I
    gather I'm supposed to set whatever-face-symbol to 'default or "default"
    or something?  Can you show me how you do it, please?

This is documented in the Emacs manual.  There are entire sections on faces.
Did you read them?

    (For example, it occurred to me that another way to achieve my faceless
    desires would be to somehow define "bold", "italic", and so on to all
    map to "default".  No luck with anything I tried in that direction,
    either.)

That is a very bad idea for how to turn off font lock.