articulation

Hemingway の'A Farewell to Arms'を読んでいます。
I looked down at the legs. At the field hospital they had the look of not too freshly ground hamburger steak. Now they were crusted and the knee was swollen and discolored and the calf sunken but there was no pus.
“Very clean,” said the house doctor. “Very clean and nice.”
“Um,” said the doctor with the beard. The third doctor looked over the house doctor’s shoulder.
“Please move the knee,” said the bearded doctor.
“I can’t.”
“Test the articulation?” the bearded doctor questioned. He had a stripe beside the three stars on his sleeve. That meant he was a first captain.
“Certainly,” the house doctor said. Two of them took hold of my right leg very gingerly and bent it.
“That hurts,” I said.
“Yes. Yes. A little further, doctor.”
“That’s enough. That’s as far as it goes,” I said.
“Partial articulation,” said the first captain.

名詞の "articulation" より、形容詞の「明瞭な」とか「はっきり発音された」を意味する "articulate" は馴染みがあります。しかし、上記の場面は怪我をした主人公の足を医者がチェックしているところなのでちょっと意味が分かりません。辞書を見ます。

・Oxford English Dictionary: the state of having a joint or connection that allows movement; a joint or connection of this type
・Merriam-Webster: the action or manner in which the parts come together at a joint: a sketch showing the articulation of the limbs
・Vocabulary.com: Articulation is the act of expressing something in a coherent verbal form, or an aspect of pronunciation involving the articulatory organs.
Articulation comes from the Latin word for "jointed" or "divided into joints." So it makes sense that the word's original definition described movement at a joint, as in the articulation of your fingers while you're typing. (The joints themselves can also be called articulations.) This noun also describes the act of joining things in such a way that makes motion possible.

最後に引用した辞書の説明では、"articulation" の元々の意味はジョイントとかジョイントの動きだったので、小説に出てきた "articulation" はその元の意味に近いのですね。