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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Interesting question – it’s one of those colloquial usages I’ve never really stopped to consider.
My meaning is a slangy term for ‘customer’. It’s in common use on this side of the pond and doesn’t sit in any particular frame like marketing, but it is very informal. I had assumed it came from someone who placed a punt or bet, getting transferred to the more general sense of a person putting down money in return for something. Looking it up in my trusty OED2, I find it’s a bit more specific than this in its origins. It gives three general classes of the word, the first all to do with gambling origins, the second to do with the flat-bottomed boat, and the third to do with football – the latter is the newest class, and the former is the oldest, dating from about 1700. Within that first group of meanings are offered 5 definitions:
1. A player who ‘punts’ or plays against the bank at certain card-games: see punt v.1
2. transf. A small professional backer of horses. Also, one who gambles in stocks and shares, or on football pools.
3. slang. A name for a member of various classes of criminal, esp. one who assists in the commission of a crime (see quots.).
4. slang. The victim of a swindler or confidence trickster.
5. colloq. A customer or client; a member of an audience or spectator; spec., the client of a prostitute.
In some contexts almost synonymous with person (but depreciatory).
Under the verb punt it offers the detail of the specific games it derives from:
a. intr. At certain card-games, as basset, faro, and baccarat: To lay a stake against the bank.
I’ll go dig out the bit about the third type of punt, which seems marginally closer to your kind of ‘abandoning’ or kicking of something…
EDIT:
ah, having now checked the noun forms more carefully I can see the boat form is much older than I was suggesting above, going back to a Latinate root:
c1000 Ælfric's Voc. in Wr.-Wülcker 166/2 Pontonium, punt. c1050 Suppl. Ælfric's Voc. ibid. 181/31 Pontonium, flyte. Caudex, punt.+ Trabaria, anbyme scip. a1100 Voc. ibid. 287/33 Pontonium, flyte. Trabaria, i. caudex, punt, i. pontonium. 1500, 1552 pontebots, etc. [see 3]. 1568 Withals Dict. 10a/2 Lintres sunt nauiculæ fluuiales, ex arbore cauata factæ, as puntes or troughes be. 1600 Holland Livy xxvi. ix. 589 Much ado he [Fulvius] had, for the great scarcitie of timber & wood, to make punts [rates] and boats for to set over his armie. 1603 I Plutarch's Mor. 1294 She searched for them in a bote or punt made of papyr reed [Žm baqidi paptqmg]. 1615 J. R. Trade's Incr. in Harl. Misc. (Malh.) III. 308 Fishing, which now we use in crayers and punts. etc
And in the gaming origin, it seems closely related to ‘point’:
2. In the game of faro: A point.
1850 Bohn's Handbk. Games 338 Terms used at Faro. Ponte or Punt, a Point. The punter or player.
Cites from OED2
Last edited by maverick; 01/31/06 03:08 PM.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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punt n.
An act of punting.
1. Rugby Football. A kick given to the ball dropped from the hands, before it reaches the ground. (Cf. drop-kick, place-kick.) Also in other varieties of football.
2. transf. An upward jerk. rare.
OED2 The citation is the 1845 Rules book from Rugby Scool. I can imagine a possible way this sense of booting a ball might come to get transferred to rejecting something in a more general way, but p'raps your version comes from some other source entirely? Hell, it is SoCal... 
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stranger
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OP
stranger
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wow, i can't believe i've never heard 'punt' associated in any way with gambling. i'm interested to know if other USans have similarly missed the boat (har).
i guess its use in football makes sense, given that the ball is punted by the offense on the fourth down whenever it's clear that the 10-yards-in-four-attempts goal will not be reached. it's in a sense a 'bet' that the distance from the goal added by the punt/kick to the receiving team's drive will increase the likelihood that the punter will get the ball back without the receiving team having scored.
i'll anxiously await the results of your excavation.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Check the edits above, when you get back :]
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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Deleted for love.
Last edited by Homo Loquens; 01/31/06 05:56 PM.
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stranger
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stranger
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Doesn't Bert in Mary Poppins (Disney version) want to go 'punting on the Thames'?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Could well be! Richard Sherman confirmed that what this movie never had was an actual script... “Right, we didn’t have a script,” says Sherman. “All we had was a story concept and lots and lots of music...." More here
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