taboo words

Tim Minchin performs Prejudice, a comedic song about the power of words and the language used to abuse and demean.

Steven Pinker presents his book The Stuff of Thought at Google in 2007. He covers language as a window into human nature, including taboo words, swearing and the psychology and game theory of indirect speech like bribery.

Tom Scott performs a fictional story at GeekyConf about the day Google accidentally stops checking passwords, letting anyone into any account. It works as a parable about how a single point of failure in login can unravel everything built on it.

Dan Callahan presents Mozilla Persona, a decentralized, cross-browser authentication system that removes site passwords, at PyCon 2013. He explains how the protocol works and how to add it to a Python site.

Adam Savage answers viewer questions on dealing with condescending colleagues, focusing on dismissive phrases such as 'why don't you just' and 'I would have'. He explains why such language undermines the person receiving it.

A Clojure/conj 2019 talk by Wilker Silva on how namespace-qualified keywords and context-free federated names can be used pragmatically for data modeling, drawn from his experience at Nubank. It builds toward a graph-based view of connecting data from many sources.

Weird Al's whiteboard-animated music video parodying corporate buzzword culture, from the album Mandatory Fun. The lyrics are packed with business jargon.

A 2012 Onion News Network satire in which HP announces a push into cloud computing and insists it knows what the cloud is.

A CollegeHumor sketch from the Hardly Working series in which a pair of startup founders pitch a website using incomprehensible buzzwords and branding nonsense. It parodies Silicon Valley startup culture.

A short Conan segment in which George R. R. Martin explains that he writes his Game of Thrones books on WordStar 4.0 on a DOS machine.

A Blackadder the Third scene in which Dr Johnson delivers his dictionary, which lacks Blackadder's invented insults such as contrafibularity.

Tom Scott visits Penistone to explain the Scunthorpe problem, showing why naive web and profanity filters block innocent words.

A short clip of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, speaking to financial analysts in September 2008, questioning what cloud computing even means. He calls it a fashion-driven buzzword.

An excerpt from the documentary Mountain Talk on Appalachian English. Residents of Southern Appalachia talk about their dialect and give examples of its distinctive words.

A short German satirical clip from Jung & Naiv at 32C3 mocking the German government's overuse of the word 'cyber'. It mixes press conference footage with jokes.

A short Star Trek TNG clip from 'Brothers' in which Data uses a lockout code with an unusually long, secret-sounding sequence.

Guy Steele's 1998 OOPSLA keynote on designing a programming language that its users can grow. He builds the talk using only one-syllable words and terms he has defined, to demonstrate the idea.

Guy Steele's classic 1998 OOPSLA keynote on how a programming language must grow with its user community. He delivers it in a playful style, starting with only monosyllabic words and defining new terms as he goes.

A short !!Con 2016 talk by blind developer Sina Bahram on how he uses a computer and writes code with a screen reader at about 1,000 words per minute. He plays how common interfaces sound and challenges the audience to go a day using only the keyboard.

David MacKay's 2007 Google Tech Talk presents Dasher, a text-entry system driven by continuous gestures and a language model, reaching about 35 words per minute with one finger and 25 hands-free. It explains the information-theory reasoning behind the design.

Leo Dirac explains how transformer models have replaced LSTMs in NLP. He gives background from bag of words through RNNs and LSTMs, then a technical deep dive into multi-headed self-attention and positional encoding, with sample code.

Vox explains the Berlin and Kay research showing that languages around the world tend to invent color words in the same order. It walks through the hierarchy and the debate around it.

A maker builds a talking banana that reads YouTube and Twitch comments aloud on stream, then fights viewers who abuse it with profanity. He ends up building a pronunciation-based filter to catch bad words.

An episode of jan Misali's Conlang Critic series reviewing Toki Pona, a minimalist constructed language with about a hundred words. It is a short, humorous critique of the language's design.

A short unofficial NASA-style spot from Reid Gower's Sagan Series, setting Carl Sagan's words about humanity spreading through the Solar System to visuals and music.

Rowan Atkinson's speech at the launch of the Reform Section 5 campaign in Parliament in 2012. He argues against criminalizing insulting words and for answering speech with more speech.

A player piano is made to reproduce human speech, here reciting a European Environmental Criminal Court proclamation in German at the 2009 World Venice Forum. This upload adds subtitles so the words become understandable.

Brian Warner, author of magic-wormhole, presents the tool at PyCon 2016. He explains how a few secret words let two computers securely transfer files, covering the cryptography (NaCl, SPAKE2) and library use.

A five-minute CBC Radio WireTap farewell video in which people of all ages offer words of wisdom to younger people. The advice is short and funny, and keeps coming back to the point that nobody really knows what they are doing.

Lex Fridman interviews Jeff Hawkins, founder of Numenta and author of On Intelligence, about the Thousand Brains Theory and reverse-engineering the neocortex. They also cover Hierarchical Temporal Memory and brain-inspired AI architectures.

Adobe's VoCo demo from the MAX 2016 Sneak Peeks, co-hosted by Jordan Peele, showing software that changes words in a voiceover by typing new ones.

A George Carlin stand-up bit from Doin' It Again about soft language and euphemism, showing how softened words hide uncomfortable facts. It touches on topics like shell shock and aging.

Grady Booch interviews John Backus, who led the IBM team that created FORTRAN in 1957, for the Computer History Museum in 2006. Backus describes the development of the first successful high-level language and its compiler. The interview runs 88 minutes.

President Reagan's 1987 radio address on free and fair trade, in which he argues for free trade over protectionism.

A nearly three-hour Joe Rogan interview with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, covering Meta's products, AI, smart glasses, and his views on culture and company direction. The conversation is wide-ranging and long-form.

Rich Hickey's Clojure Conj 2023 talk on design in practice, covering problem statements, decision matrices, choosing precise words and making decisions in a team.

Alvin Lucier's 1969 minimalist piece in which a spoken text is repeatedly played back and re-recorded in a room until the room's resonances replace the words. This is the 1981 Lovely Music recording.

A Wired short on competitive high school policy debate, where students speak at around 350 words per minute. It shows how a nerdy contest turned into a high-speed spectacle.

A mashup of a Sesame Street Count clip with a Lemon Demon song, where the swear words are censored in absurd ways. It is a short comedy piece about censorship.

An undercover report from the 2019 Flat Earth Conference by the comedy channel All Gas No Brakes, which interviews attendees on camera.