One picture holds this word together: something bending. Not breaking, not stopping — bending, and staying itself while it does. A voice bends up at the end of a question. A word bends into a new shape to show that it happened yesterday. A line on a graph bends one way, then swaps and bends the other. In each case the thing that bends is still the same thing; only its shape has moved.
From the word’s history
The word comes from Latin inflexiōnem, which the source glosses as 'alteration' but says means, literally, 'bending'. So the bending picture is not a teacher's invention: it is what the word says. The older English spelling was inflexion, and the ct spelling we use now came in under the influence of inflect and words like correction.
這個字來自拉丁文 inflexiōnem，字面意思就是「彎曲」。所以「彎」這張圖不是為了好記才編出來的，它本來就是這個字在說的事。英文早期拼成 inflexion，現在的 ct 拼法是受到 inflect 和 correction 這類字影響才變過來的，兩種拼法到今天都還看得到。
Wiktionary 'inflection', supplied in this evidence packet, source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:191720143 — 'borrowed from Latin inflexiōnem ("alteration", literally "bending")'.
登入就可以看每一支怎麼連回核心畫面。