coded language

A short excerpt of Rob Pike's Lang.NEXT 2014 talk where he describes Go's target audience as young Google programmers who are not researchers. The language has to be easy for them to understand and adopt.

Finnish YouTuber Saara improvises gibberish that mimics how various languages sound to people who do not speak them. The sentences are mostly made up, and the clip went viral.

A local news report about a woman who ordered a pizza on a 911 call to discreetly signal domestic violence and give her address to the dispatcher. The coverage includes the actual dispatcher call.

A short clip of Stephen Fry defending swearing as a rich and essential part of the English language and rejecting the idea that it is unnecessary.

Finnish comedian Ismo riffs on how the English word for shit is the most complicated word in the language, with its many meanings and uses. It is a four-minute comedy bit.

Weird Al Yankovic's 2014 parody of 'Blurred Lines' that scolds common grammar and usage errors, with a kinetic typography video. It is a catchy music video about language mistakes.

A two-minute clip of comedian Bill Hicks doing his routine on marketing and advertising, with explicit language. He mocks marketers and urges them to get out of the business.

A short video built around Douglas Crockford, creator of JSON, saying JavaScript is a flawed language and that developers should eventually move on from it. It is a brief commentary clip with little technical detail.

A comedy segment where Eddie Izzard travels to Friesland to try speaking Old English, claiming English originated in Holland and buying a cow to prove it.

Google's 2014 reel introducing Material Design, a visual language based on a paper-and-ink material metaphor and a system of motion. It is a short promotional video.

A short audio clip of a 1981 interview in which Republican strategist Lee Atwater explains to a political scientist how the party could win racist voters without using overtly racist language. It was published by The Nation with analysis by Rick Perlstein.

A short George Carlin routine on how the term shell shock was softened into combat fatigue and then PTSD. He argues that euphemism hides the reality of suffering.

A two-minute comedy sketch in which a foreigner speaking fluent Japanese is repeatedly not understood by Japanese people who refuse to process it.

A two-minute promotional video introducing the team at Memrise, a language-learning company, as part of their recruiting page.

A 1972 song by Adriano Celentano whose lyrics are nonsense syllables designed to sound like American English to non-English speakers. It is a rock and rap-flavored novelty track with a video.

A short clip of Penn and Teller arguing, in blunt and profane language, for vaccination and against anti-vaccine claims. It covers risk versus benefit and herd immunity.

The earliest filmed version of the Turbo Encabulator technical-jargon parody, shot in the late 1970s with narrator Bud Haggert. It deadpans a stream of meaningless engineering language.

The official video for Baba Yetu, Christopher Tin's Swahili-language choral piece written as the theme to Civilization IV. It was the first video game music to win a Grammy.

SoundHound's CEO demos Hound, a voice assistant, handling fast compound natural language queries with context and detailed criteria. The video leaked before the product's official launch.

Alan Kay demonstrates GRaIL, a graphical input language system from around 1968 in which hand-drawn strokes become boxes, connections and dataflow-style programs.

A two-minute clip of Richard Feynman on the difference between knowing the name of something and actually knowing it. He uses the example of knowing a bird's name in every language and still knowing nothing about the bird.

Peter Pringle sings the opening of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian, accompanied by a reconstructed ancient instrument. The description gives background on Sumer, cuneiform and how little is known about the language's pronunciation.

A short clip from a 1973 NOVA episode in which Richard Feynman recalls his father teaching him that knowing the name of a bird in many languages tells you nothing about the bird.

A short 1966 propaganda interview clip in which Jeremiah Denton, a US prisoner of war in Vietnam, blinks the word TORTURE in Morse code. Naval Intelligence later decoded the message.

A short animated excerpt of Alan Watts describing 'prickles' (rigorous, scientific types) and 'goo' (soft, spiritual types). He argues the real division is between prickly goo and gooey prickles.

A Burnistoun sketch in which a voice-recognition elevator cannot understand two Scottish men saying the number eleven. It satirizes voice interfaces that fail on accents.

The Monty Python sketch "Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook", in which a faulty phrasebook yields lines like "My hovercraft is full of eels".

A three-minute David Mitchell's Soapbox rant addressed to Americans about the phrase "could care less", arguing it means the opposite of what speakers intend. Delivered as dry British comic commentary on language usage.

A short comedy video of the Turbo Encabulator, a piece of technobabble nonsense describing an imaginary machine in deadpan engineering language.

A one-minute 1999 Qwest commercial where a hotel clerk promises every movie ever made in any language, any time.