Word: reflexive
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Would Bill and June take dinner with Lady Bird and the President? White had been half expecting the call. "It was a kind of reflex action," he said later. "Just the sort of thing a fellow would do-to call up a friend and ask him to come over to dinner." Since then, the Whites have been invited to dinner many times at the Johnsons' 18-acre spread on Pennsylvania Avenue. Johnson has twice asked Bill White over for swims in the White House pool-a presidential invitation as highly coveted by the Washington press corps...
...Reflex. White possesses matchless claims to the President's high regard. Both men are Texans, although White considers himself a Southerner and considers Johnson a Westerner. Their friendship has ripened for 31 years. It began when Johnson was the gangly 23-year-old secretary to Texas' U.S. Representative Richard Kleberg and White was a Washington correspondent for the Associated Press...
Denizens of new office buildings have not only grown accustomed to the loneliness of the operatorless elevator, they have also developed a conditioned reflex. They instinctively slap any metal object-typewriter, watercooler, doorknob-with the flat of the hand before using. Otherwise, little blue sparks fly from fingertips and a nasty, if harmless, jolt runs up the arm. In fact, even the most cautious palm-slapper sometimes yields a small tingle...
Almost by reflex, people rushed to disclaim even remote complicity in the murder. "Thank God it wasn't a Negro," said a Negro in Toronto. Many others insisted on reading into the event their own political passions. Statesmen in Africa, Asia and elsewhere insisted that the deed must have been done by a racist, and that Kennedy was a martyr like Lincoln or Gandhi. And Nehru could not resist remarking that the murder gave evidence of "dark corners in the U.S., and this great tragedy is a slap for the concept of democracy...
...shut on anything that touches it. If a fish so much as brushes against either of the bird's mandibles, the beak closes in as little as nineteen-thousandths of a second. By contrast, the human eye takes forty-thousandths of a second to blink when startled. This reflex makes the wood stork the fastest fisherman on record, and certainly gives it the fastest jaws in the drawling South...