Tom Scott

A quick and dirty video from Tom (http://tomscott.com - @tomscott) and Matt (http://mattg.co.uk - @unnamedculprit) - ten illegal things to do in London. Yes, these are all properly illegal: you can see our references at http://tomscott.com/law/

There's a good argument that lyric videos count as a whole new genre. Here's that genre's history, presented in its own style.

Tom Scott (http://tomscott.com @tomscott) and Matt Parker (http://standupmaths.com @standupmaths) investigate some of the London Underground's greatest lies.

Jonathan Ross is known as "Wossy". He can't say his Rs. But there's a good chance that you've got the same speech defect he does, and you don't even know it.

There are lots of interesting features in other languages, some of which English would really benefit from having. I'm going to talk about four of them: time-independence, clusivity, absolute direction, and evidentiality. Also, I've learned from last week: no irritating piano music this time!

Colours are easy, right? They're one of the first things you learn as a kid. But what if "blue" and "green" were the same colour? Or "light blue" and "dark blue" weren't? Well, guess what: there are languages out there that do exactly that.

I give Thinking Digital 2013's health and safety crew a massive headache, while talking about sentimental value, physical objects and digital data.

Why is an "odour" classier than a "smell"? Why is a "beverage" fancier than a "drink"? The answer lies in English history - and in the way we automatically know which 'register' of language to use. (Includes bonus medieval advice for constipation!)

If you see the phrase "10 items or less" in a supermarket and immediately cringe and complain that it should be "10 items or fewer"... well, you are not going to like this week's video.

Every so often, someone has a brilliant idea to reform English spelling. And you're probably thinking that I'm about to go off on a rant about how spelling reform never works. The trouble is... sometimes, just sometimes, it does work.

CORRECTIONS March 9th, 2019 Back in 2013, I made a video about ‘singular they’ and gender-neutral pronouns. Looking back on it with half a decade of hindsight, there are several things I want to correct. I also have a few thoughts on how the reactions to it have changed over time, and why the video’s comments will remain off. Firstly, while editing the video, I cut the first sentence of the script. That sentence didn’t seem to add anything, and I’m a believer in ‘don’t bore us, get to the chorus’. That would have been fine — if only the script didn’t refer back to that first sentence later on, noting that the viewer probably didn’t notice the singular they in it. There used to be an annotation explaining that mistake, but YouTube’s deleted all annotations now. I regret the error. Secondly, I mentioned that recently-coined gender-neutral prounouns (hir, xe, etc) haven’t caught on in regular usage, and that trying to deliberately add new words into a language is extremely difficult.

It's not that Hawaiian has a completely different word for Christmas -- it's just that Kalikimaka is the closest that Hawaiian can possibly get to the word Christmas.

Or: what happens when you privatise Big Brother.

In one of the tallest buildings in London, Tom answers the question of how many Gs you pull in a lift, with the help of some sugar and a very dirty kitchen scale.

Why do we say "Ye Olde"? Why is "Menzies" pronounced "Mingis"? To find out, we have to go back into history.

The order of adjectives is one of those wonderful linguistic things that no-one really notices until it's pointed out to them.

Twitter was set up to support 140 characters. And in the English alphabet, that's easy to understand: a character is a letter, number, space or punctuation mark. People more or less agree with computers there. And if it was twenty years ago, that's exactly how the system would work. That far, no further.

There's an interesting thing about English that hardly anyone thinks about. There are two "th" sounds. And if you want to know why it took me twenty-one takes to record this intro, you try switching them round.