Ever heard of a MacGuffin?
I count myself as something of a film fan, but I confess that i hadn’t heard of a particular cinematic term until it was used by my erudite Postwatch colleague Howard Webber in his speech to a conference this week. The term is “MacGuffin”.
The word refers to “a plot device that motivates the characters or advances the story, but the details of which are of little or no importance otherwise”. You can find some discussion and examples here.