punt

   [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.

[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {zorch}]