schmuck bait
n.— «But because of the serial nature of television, Schmuck Bait has a distinctly different meaning. As submitted by Ron Anderson, for TV—Schmuck Bait: When the promos for a show tease an outcome which will obviously never happen. Example: “Will Ross leave Rachel forever and move to Paris?” Obviously the actor isn’t going to leave the show so it’s “schmuck bait.” This term doesn’t just refer to the promos. When coming up with dilemmas and storylines, a threat to characters which we’d obviously never let happen—and only a viewer who had no idea how television works would fall for—is called Schmuck Bait. So not only is the above example promo Schmuck Bait, but during the writing of the episode, this may well have occured:» —“Writing: Jargon Preservation” by John Rogers Kung Fu Monkey Apr. 15, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
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...
A Kentucky listener says her father often prefaced statements with the phrase I tell you what’s the truth. This regionalism appears in the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English (Bookshop|Amazon). A shorter version is I’ll tell you...