Is there a word for the area under a desk into which your legs fit? I thought that it was called a well, but that doesn’t show up in my dictionaries.
A modesty panel is the name for the strip of wood or metal across the front of the desk that prevented lechers from looking up of the skirts of secretaries back in the old days. But what it is that the modesty panel is in front of?
Knee hole or kneehole appears in the dictionary as the space under the desk. Thanks for that. The problem is that my memory tells me there’s another word for it. It’s not footwell: that seems to be car-specific.
But the word is used in comedies when people scrunch up hiding under the desk. They don’t hide in the kneehole. They hide in the …
That’s a different desk. Kennedy was the first President to use theResolute Desk in the Oval Office. Previously (and during the G. H. W. Bush presidency) it was used elsewhere in the White House. Also, the front panel wasn’t commissioned until 1944, and only actually got added after FDR had died.
I just googled it (like everyone else I’m sure) and amongst all the references to kneehole I did happen across one random person calling it a kickspace. Could that be what you were thinking of? At the very least it sounds better then kneehole and I think most people would immediately know what was being talked about. Especially if the word desk was nearby.
That sounds exactly like it should be the word. But I can’t find anybody who uses it, not even your random person.
Let’s start using it. All of us. Not one of us. Not two of us. At least three of us. If three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people calling the leg area under a desk a kickspace. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day calling the leg area under a desk a kickspace. Friends, they may think it’s a movement.
And that’s what it is, the Call the Leg Area Under a Desk a Kickspace Movement. With feeling.
Slow your role there buddy. They’ll put you on the Group W bench with the father rapers and mother stabbers and that guy that put that an envelope under a half a ton of garbage.