macguffin

A plot device that motivates the characters and advance the story, particularly one whose importance is accepted completely by the story's characters, yet from the audience's perspective it might be minimally explained or may test their suspension of disbelief if it is scrutinized. The device, usually an object, is common in films, especially thrillers.
It is important that the audience never actually see the MacGuffin. I dunno why.

The term "MacGuffin" was invented by Alfred Hitchcock; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, he explained the term in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University:

In regard to the tune, we have a name in the studio, and we call it the 'MacGuffin'. It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is always the necklace and in spy stories it is always the papers.

Interviewed in 1966 by François Truffaut, Hitchcock illustrated the term "MacGuffin" with this story:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, 'What's that package up there in the baggage rack?' And the other answers, 'Oh that's a McGuffin.' The first one asks 'What's a McGuffin?' 'Well' the other man says, 'It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.' The first man says, 'But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,' and the other one answers 'Well, then that's no McGuffin!' So you see, a McGuffin is nothing at all.

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pigeon

A mostly brainless ball of fat and feathers that poops on everything. Can be trained, but why?

Stupid pigeon pooped on my car!

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bad science

a term used to describe well-intentioned but incorrect, obsolete, incomplete, or over-simplified expositions of scientific ideas.

An example of bad science would be the statement that electrons revolve in orbits around the atomic nucleus, a picture that was discredited in the 1920's, but is so much more vivid and easily grasped than the one that supplanted it that it shows no sign of dying out.

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asterix

Also known as Asterix The Gaul, a badass midget warrior who first appeared in the first issue of Pilote, a French comic anathology.

Nobody fucks with Asterix, man. Not even Chuck Norris.

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locust

1.) A type of grasshopper that periodically appears and eats all vegetation available before laying eggs and dying. It is edible.
2.) The harmless (but very noisy) periodic cicada, which emerges every 17 years. It, too, is edible.
3.)Any overly abundant and destructive or annoying entity. Not always edible.

1.) Aaaaaaack! Locusts!

2.) Aaaaargh! Locusts!

3.) Aieeeee! Locusts!

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biscuit

1. A small cake of shortened bread leavened with baking powder or soda.

2. A thin, crisp cracker or cookie. (British)

3. A kind of unraised bread formed into flat cakes, and bakes hard, ie ship biscuit, sea biscuit.

1. I'm gonna have some biscuits and gravy.

2. Biscuits and *WHAT?!*

3. I'm don't even bother to eat 'em anymore. I just use 'em to patch up the boat.

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Eye of Providence

The eyeball thingy at the back of the dollar bill.

The Eye of Providence is proof of the Illuminati, and Elvis is alive and orbiting Mars in a pickle barrel!

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