flect

The root flect comes from Latin flectere ("to bend, to turn, to curve"), with the past-participle stem flexus. In English the root shows up in two spellings: flect (from the present stem flectere) and flex (from flexus). Both carry the same core image — something being bent or turned out of a straight line.

Start with the physical picture: imagine bending a stick. Now add prefixes, and watch the direction of the bend change:

- re- (back) + flectere → reflect: to "bend back." Light hits a mirror and bends back toward you — a reflection. From there the meaning travels. If a result "bends back" to its cause, it reflects it (sales reflect demand). And if your mind bends back over an idea instead of running forward, you reflect on it — you think it over. One verb, three layers: physics, representation, and thought, all from the single image of bending back.
- de- (away, aside) + flectere → deflect: to "bend aside." A goalkeeper deflects the ball; armor deflects a blow. Then it goes abstract: a politician deflects criticism, deflects attention — bending the incoming pressure off to one side so it doesn't land.
- genu (knee) + flectere → genuflect: literally to "bend the knee." It names the physical act of kneeling in a church or before a king, and by extension the figurative sense of fawning or showing servile deference.

The flex spelling fills in the rest of the family. flexible is "able to be bent" — first of materials (a flexible wire), then of people and plans (a flexible schedule). inflection is a "bending" of the voice (the rise and fall of intonation) or of a word's form (grammatical endings that bend a word into its tenses and cases). The circumflex accent (â) is named for the way the mark "bends around" — circum- (around) + flexus.

The pattern is reliable: keep the image of bending out of a straight line, and let the prefix tell you which way it bends. Bend it back → reflect. Bend it aside → deflect. Bend at the knee → genuflect.