stick one's neck out

Example: “She stuck her neck out to defend her colleague in the meeting.”

Origin: Two images circulate and both point the same way. The commoner reading is the slaughterhouse or the block: a bird stretching its neck out, or a condemned person laying it across the wood, brings the one irreplaceable and wholly undefended part of the body into reach of an axe. The other is the turtle, which cannot see, feed, or move without extending its head beyond the shell that otherwise makes it safe, and which is defenseless for exactly as long as it does so. Both capture the specific bargain the idiom names: exposure is not accidental but chosen, it is undertaken because nothing useful can be done from safety, and the part exposed is the one that cannot survive being wrong. The phrase is American, attested from the 1930s.