bunt

n 1: the act of hitting a baseball lightly without swinging the

bat

2: disease of wheat characterized by replacement of the grains

with greasy masses of smelly smut spores [syn: {stinking

smut}]

3: similar to Tilletia caries [syn: {stinking smut}, {Tilletia

foetida}]

4: fungus that destroys kernels of wheat by replacing them with

greasy masses of smelly spores [syn: {Tilletia caries}]

v 1: hit a ball in such a way so as to make it go a short

distance [syn: {drag a bunt}]

2: to strike, thrust or shove against, often with head or

horns: "He butted his sister out of the way." [syn: {butt}]

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 run-time system."

[{Jargon File}]