beat around the bush

Example: “Stop beating around the bush and tell me whether I got the job.”

Origin: From bird hunting, and the preposition carries the whole point. Beaters were employed to drive game birds out of cover and toward the waiting nets or guns by striking the undergrowth, but striking directly into a bush was unwise — it risked injuring the birds, ruining the drive, or disturbing something larger and less welcome — so the beaters worked around the edges instead, approaching the target indirectly. The phrase is old: it appears in the English romance Generydes around 1440, already used figuratively, which makes it one of the longest-serving idioms in ordinary use. The original sense was closer to cautious preliminary work than to evasion; the modern impatience with someone who beats around the bush is a later hardening of it.