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
Imagine telling someone how to get to your home, but without using the name of your street, or any other street within ten miles. Could you do it? We take street names for granted, but these words are useful for far more, like applying for a job or...
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...