bus
n.— «We hear the low growl of a panther—but it’s the hiss of the brakes of a bus as it comes into shot from screen right. Watching this in the right circumstances, you’ll jump out of your skin…as no doubt audiences in 1943. This technique is known in horror-movie technique as a “bus” in direct reference to this very scene. It’s long since become a cliché, but this is where it first appeared.» —“Cat People (1943)/The Curse of the Cat People” DVDTimes Dec. 12, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
When there’s no evening meal planned at home, what do you call that scramble to cobble together your own dinner? Some people apply acronyms like YOYO — “you’re on your own” — or CORN, for “Clean Out your Refrigerator...