punt

1. to kick a football before it touches the ground, when let fall from the hands.
2. Act of playing a basset, baccara, faro, etc.
3. a flat-bottomed boat.
4. the basic unit of money in Ireland.
5. propel with pole.
6. place a bet on.
7. to skip something. (as in "I punted that class today")

punt v.

[from the punch line of an old joke referring to American football: "Drop back 15 yards and punt!"] 1. To give up, typically without any intention of retrying. "Let's punt the movie tonight." "I was going to hack all night to get this feature in, but I decided to punt" may mean that you've decided not to stay up all night, and may also mean you're not ever even going to put in the feature. 2. More specifically, to give up on figuring out what the Right Thing is and resort to an inefficient hack. 3. A design decision to defer solving a problem, typically because one cannot define what is desirable sufficiently well to frame an algorithmic solution. "No way to know what the right form to dump the graph in is -- we'll punt that for now." 4. To hand a tricky implementation problem off to some other section of the design. "It's too hard to get the compiler to do that; let's punt to the runtime system." 5. To knock someone off an Internet or chat connection; a `punter' thus, is a person or program that does this.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

Why is the punt there and what purpose does it serve? alt.food.wine has been asked this many, many times and lists among the most popular answers:

1.   An artifact of the bottle making process. When bottles were hand-blown, the hot bottle was transferred off of the blow pipe onto a device called a punty in order to cool. This device caused the indentation to appear in the finished bottle, and so it has remained a part of bottle design.

2.   A way to make the bottle stand up better. A flat-bottom bottle design would have very little room for manufacturing error. A concave bottom design would not suffer this problem.

3.   To strengthen the bottle and prevent the bottom from blowing out. This is the most common explanation; however, (according to alt.food.wine) there is little evidence to support this -- and at this time no one has bothered to do the maths required to confirm or deny this. You might notice that champagne bottles have the largest punt of all wine bottles, supposedly to withstand the pressure created by the sparkling white wine -- so whether or not this is the right explanation, the wine makers certainly seem to put some stock in it.

4.   It has remained part of the design for several practical reasons: It makes the bottles more stackable, it creates a place for sediment to collect, and it allows the bottle to be more easily (and some say more elegantly) gripped from the bottom for pouring. These might all be true, but they are certainly all afterthoughts and probably not original design considerations.

5.   It makes the wine more esthetically pleasing/marketable. Ouroboros astutely suggests that the punt takes up just enough space so that the bottle must be made taller, and thus will stand out above other bottles on a shelf.


This node was made possible by the Vintage Voice alt.food.wine Punt FAQ

Punt (?), v. i. [F. ponter, or It. puntare, fr. L. punctum point. See Point.]

To play at basset, baccara, faro. or omber; to gamble.

She heard . . . of his punting at gaming tables.
Thackeray.

© Webster 1913

Punt, n.

Act of playing at basset, baccara, faro, etc.

© Webster 1913

Punt, n. [AS., fr. L. ponto punt, pontoon. See Pontoon.] (Naut.)

A flat-bottomed boat with square ends. It is adapted for use in shallow waters.

© Webster 1913

Punt, v. t.

1.

To propel, as a boat in shallow water, by pushing with a pole against the bottom; to push or propel (anything) with exertion. Livingstone.

2. (Football)

To kick (the ball) before it touches the ground, when let fall from the hands.

© Webster 1913

Punt, n. (Football)

The act of punting the ball.

© Webster 1913

Punt, v. i.

1.

To boat or hunt in a punt.

2.

To punt a football.

© Webster 1913