Punted

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Struck a ball by dropping it and kicking it before it hits the ground ; chose to reject or avoid dealing with a task or decision
2. Propelled an object by letting it fall and kicking it with the foot ; deliberately avoided responsibility or passed a problem to someone else
3. Sent a ball forward using the foot after releasing it from the hands ; opted to defer handling a responsibility or to evade making a choice

Etymology: The verb "punt" is a good example of one word hiding several unrelated histories. The boat sense came first: a flat-bottomed craft, the upper-Thames punt, was in use for placing eel traps in the 19th century. That boat name traces back through Old English to Latin "pontō", a Gaulish word for a flat-bottomed boat or pontoon, itself from "pons", meaning bridge. The kicking sense is a different story. It came from rugby, where a player drops the ball and kicks it before it touches the ground, and it is possibly a dialectal variant of "bunt". The sense of rejecting or avoiding a decision is a figurative extension, and it is tied to the idea of giving something up in a risky game rather than to the boat. Historically, "punt" also appears in gambling, where a punter places a bet against the house, which is a further sense that developed separately.

Synonyms: kicked, booted, threw, launched, sent

Antonyms: caught, held, received, kept, contained