For instance, did you know there's a name for the technique (familiar to filmgoers) whereby the voice of a narrator usually begins and often supplements the actual story, giving the illusion that the story itself is merely an expansion of his own words? It's known as narratage.

It's easy to see how the verb narrate turned into narratage, but we'd bet you can't figure out the story behind the British dialect term shaw. Nope, there's no link to George Bernard: we can thank an Old English word akin to the Old Norse word for promontory for that label for a strip of woods forming the boundary of a field.

Our third term may be familiar to French bartenders: pousse-café. Literally "coffee chaser" in French, pousse-café names the after-dinner drink that consists of several liqueurs of different colors and specific gravities poured so as to remain in separate layers.