teaser

Marketing uses it for the earliest, most withholding stage of a campaign: a logo, a date, a few seconds of a chorus. A teaser comes before the trailer or the full advertising, and it is judged by how much talk it starts rather than how much it explains: which is the practical difference between the two words.

Television writers also call it a cold open: a scene scripted as its own section and played before the opening titles. It usually closes on a hook (a question, a shock, a joke) strong enough to carry viewers through the credits. Unlike the advance preview, it is part of the episode itself, not something released ahead of it.

Here the word is at its plainest: tease plus -er, the person doing the teasing. The same agent idea runs through its technical uses, where a machine, a preview or a hookless lure does the teasing. For someone who pokes fun, the shorter noun tease means the same and fits the same sentences: a merciless tease, a merciless teaser.

In a mill, teasing is the opening-up stage: matted or tangled locks of wool are pulled apart until the fibers lie loose and fluffy, ready to be carded and spun into yarn. The word covers both the worker who did this by hand and the machine that does the same job, so context decides which is meant.

Big-game crews trolling for marlin and sailfish run teasers in the wake to raise a fish. Once one rises, the teaser is reeled away so the fish turns on a baited hook or lure nearby; its job ends the moment it works. Having no hook is the point: it is a decoy, not a catch.

Stagehands pair it with the tormentors, the masking pieces at each side; together they form an adjustable inner frame just behind the main opening of the stage. Lowering the teaser shrinks the picture for a small, close scene, and raising it, or trimming it higher, makes room for tall scenery.

Fluke anglers use the word for something that catches fish in its own right: unlike the hookless trolling decoy, this teaser usually carries a hook and is tied on a short line a little above the bucktail, so a fish can strike either one. On some days it outfishes the bucktail it was added to support.

A shunt winding is wired across the machine's terminals rather than in line with the load, so current still runs through it when the outside circuit is broken. That small current is what holds the field magnets' magnetism between loads, leaving the machine ready to work when the main circuit closes again.

British dialect speech gives the jaeger this name; in standard English and in general writing the bird is a jaeger, and that is the word most readers will recognize. Use teaser for the bird only when quoting or recreating the speech of the places that say it, and gloss it on first mention so no one pictures a person.