tache d’huile
n.— «Gallieni called this carefully coordinated military and social strategy the tache d’huile, the oil spot. Start out and carefully secure a hundred such bases and you are on your way to conquering a country.» —by Frederick Quinn French Overseas Empire May 30, 2000. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
A California listener shares a couple of pranks from her time in the U.S. Marines, where unsuspecting recruits would be ordered to complete impossible tasks. She remembers that newbies would be sent to retrieve a bucket of frequency grease or a...
If your handwriting leaves something to be desired, you could apologize for your chicken scratchings. But there’s a more precise term: griffonage, which has nothing to do with the mythical griffin, though the two sound alike. Griffonage comes from...