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Knee-jerk

Posted by Henry on February 19, 2004

In Reply to: Knee-jerk posted by Sathyaish on February 19, 2004

: A contemporary coinage by the press, I suppose, beats my brains in establishing any possibility of a coherence in between the constituent words and the meaning. What the duece did they imagine would be obvious in tying the word knee-jerk to the meaning "automatic" or "predictable".

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: PS: My memory fails me, what are each of the words (the two nouns or a noun and an adjective as in ) in a hyphenated phrase individually known as?

When a doctor taps you just below the knee and your leg kicks out, he is demonstrating the knee jerk or patellar reflex.

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