hit/touch a (raw) nerve
nerve
verb
uk /nɜːv/ us /nɝːv/
 nerve yourselfUK
to make yourself brave enough to do something: 鼓足勇气
[ + to infinitive ]It took her several months before she eventually nerved herself (up)to invite him to her house.她过了好几个月才终于鼓足勇气邀请他去自己家。
He took a deep breath, nerved himself, and jumped into the icy waters.
Finally, twenty minutes into the meeting, she nerved herself to speak up.
On the way to the meeting room he'd been nerving himself for the confrontation.
She felt sick inside, nerving herself for the question she was about to put to him.
Eventually, I nerved myself up to speak.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Brave and courageous
adventurous
adventurously
audacious
ballsy
be man enough to do somethingidiom
fearless
fearlessly
gallant
gallantly
get up
man up
manfully
muster something up
nerves of steelidiom
pluck
unperturbed
valiant
valiantly
valorously
venturesome

nerve | American Dictionary

nerve
noun
us/nɜrv/

nervenoun (BODY FIBER)

[ C ] biology
a group of long, thin fibers in the body, esp. in the brain, which send and receive messages that control how the body reacts to signals it receives, such as to changes in temperature or pressure against the skin

nervenoun (BRAVERY)

[ U ]
bravery or confidence necessary to do something difficult or unpleasant:
It takes a lot of nerve to get up in front of a class when you’re not used to it.
[ U ]
Nerve also means the ability to do something rude without caring about other people’s feelings:
She has some nerve.
I can't believe she had the nerve to call me fat!

Examples of nerve

nerve
The effect of chronically elevated intraocular pressure on the rat optic nerve head extracellular matrix.
Each micrograph in a pair is taken from the same eccentricity of the intact and nerve-transected retinas.
Analysis of the wave forms allows information to be obtained about the middle ear, the cochlea, the eighth nerve and the central auditory connections.
It was no longer followed by movement of the muscle, as though the nerve vessel had been exhausted of fluid.
Experimental animals received a total of four crush injuries to the right facial nerve over the course of 1 year.
Direct and indirect activation of nerve cells by electrical pulses applied extracellularly.
The proliferation was already prominent 2 days after nerve injury.
Similarly, the nerve injury-induced proinflammatory gene expression in the spinal cord is also reduced in the toll-like receptor 2 knockout mice.
The nerve injury-induced spinal cord microglia and astrocyte activation is reduced in the toll-like receptor 2 knockout mice.
Therefore, we monitored the timing of mast-cell recruitment to normal nerves.
From there, efferent impulses are carried by the vagus and phrenic nerves to the stomach and abdominal musculature, resulting in vomiting.
The inhibition of sodium currents in myelinated nerve by quaternary derivatives of lidocaine.
Cancer can cause peripheral neuropathy as a result of direct invasion or compression of the nerve or through remote (paraneoplastic) effects.
They grow posteriorly from the lateral nerve ganglia into the developing neck region with cell bodies concentrated around their growing tips.
Astrocytes are confined largely to the nerve fiber layer at the inner border of the retina.
See all examples of nerve
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.