Beat around the bush

A literal survival technique from medieval hunting. Hunters hired beaters to walk through undergrowth striking the bushes with long sticks, flushing birds or game out into the open where the actual hunters, waiting with nets or bows, could catch them. Beaters deliberately struck around a bush rather than into it, since going in directly risked disturbing something far more dangerous than the intended quarry, a wild boar or a nest of bees among the obvious hazards. The earliest written trace is the 1440 poem Generydes, using the plain phrase "beat the bush"; the "around" version followed by 1572, in George Gascoigne's writing. The figurative sense, circling a difficult subject rather than confronting it directly, grew naturally from that cautious, indirect approach.