No, I said 'Punt'.

Todays ramble comes from Dr Language Person, who is spending the weekend
in Cambridge:

The word 'Punt' ( apart from just sounding rude ) has many different and interesting meanings.

The most common one is the football term, to punt the ball. I'm not sure how this is considered different from just kicking the ball, as one can punt in all sorts of situations, but I believe it generally means that you hand ( well, boot, actually ) said leather object to the other team, who are hopefully a long way away.

This then makes more sense of the next meaning , 'to punt', that is often used in the business world, where one would hand off something to another person. ( "The project was so screwed that jack punted it over to operations" )

Now, where I come from - a good British colony, punt has another meaning and it is a gambling term. 'To have a punt' means to place a bet on something. It can also mean to just 'take a chance', and is just yet another word that can be used to add colour to a conversation, "I'm punting that she will call back".

If you end up at a place where there are a lot of people all gambling, like at a racetrack, you can also use the collective plural term the gambling community and refer to them as 'the punters' , or just a bunch of fools.

This close association between foolishness and taking a chance is no coincidence and the word 'punter' can often be used to describe anyone stupid or desperate enough for anything. ( "Did the alligator wrestling night attract any punters ?" )

Now lastly, the word 'punt' can also be used to describe a boat, or more specifically a water borne form of transport. 'Punting along' usually means to move so slowly that the boat leaves no wake and that there is no general plan in the direction or timing of the journey. So one can rightly assume that to 'go for a bit of a punt (on the river)' is just another term for a pointless meandering waste
of time. It is also fairly easy to follow the evolutionary path of the terms
'punting along', 'punting about', 'Farting about' 'Piss Farting about' and
'screwing around'

Curiously enough, in the college town of Cambridge, punting on the river Cam has become so popular that the wooden, flat bottomed boats are themselves called 'Punts'. The fact that this gives a fairly formal association between one of the worlds great universities and a bunch of people screwing around wasting time is something best left unexplored. But I'm sure some scholars out there who are dying to tell me that the boats were called punts first and that the term 'punting' was invented because no-one wanted to admit that they were just 'farting around in the punts' ( actually, I'm punting on it )

It is more interesting to conclude that the many variations of the word mean that you can assemble some truly bizzare sentences indeed, such as this one :

"I'm punting that it will stay sunny when the race is on so we can grab a punt and have a punt with the punters, unless the weather changes and they punt the event to next week"