hackneyed » hack-kneed

Variant(s):  hackkneed, hack kneed

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “… Jack stumbles into a hack-kneed conspiracy that is sure to put his byline back on the front page….” (Green Apple Books, blurb for Basket Case> by Carl Hiaasen)
  • As long as one invokes the hack kneed platitudes of “national security” or “the war on terror”, there is virtually no crime that that is too extreme. (Al Jazeerah, OP-ed piece by Mike Whitney)
  • While this isn’t apparent to people who didn’t follow the production, the poor pacing the hack-kneed editing creates IS a apparent, and is damaging. (Amazon customer review, July 15, 2005)
  • Bukowski seems real anathema however, his works putting the lie to the previous pair’s hackkneed chapters. (Barnes & Noble customer review, January 22, 2003)
  • Thanks for the regular expression help, though. Works better than the hack-kneed stuff I was doing ^^. (Gamon software forum (AU), Mar 31, 2004)

At this point, Google only has about 175 hits for ‘hack-kneed’, many on blogs or book-, movie-, or tv-review pages.

The new term seems to be less an observation that the subject is overworked, and more an observation that it is somehow feeble, or ‘weak in the knees’.

[Draft edited and posted by CW, 2005/10/14]

| link | entered by Barbara, 2005/10/14 |

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