end run
Evasive action, as in The new department head was making an end run around the old hands who opposed her appointment. This term comes from American football, where it denotes an offensive play in which the ball carrier runs around one end of the opposing team's line. [Mid-1900s]
| a fool or simpleton; ninny. |
| a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question. |