Tom Scott's Language Files
July 17, 2013 9:33 AM   Subscribe

For several years now, Tom Scott, a young man in Britain, has mostly done silly, entertaining things on YouTube, things like, "Two Drums and a Cymbal Fall off a Cliff," "The Matt Gray High Five Face Off," "Robocoaster Challenge: Reciting Shakespeare while attached to a giant robot arm," "Google Glasses: A New Way to Hurt Yourself," and "Welcome to Life: the singularity, ruined by lawyers" (previously). But recently, he's done a series of videos that are interesting more than they're silly: eight videos which introduce linguistic concepts like phonotactics, clusivity & evidentiality, and the contrast between descriptivism and prescriptivism (he's decidedly the former, fyi).
posted by ocherdraco (11 comments total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh, and don't worry, he can still do silly things, too, like 21 Questions Wrong.
posted by ocherdraco at 9:34 AM on July 17, 2013 [1 favorite]


That "Welcome to Life" video hugely reminded my of the really excellent book Everyone In Silico by Jim Munroe
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 9:40 AM on July 17, 2013


Magic!

I spat crisps at the computer while thinking about my 'R's.
posted by stanf at 10:38 AM on July 17, 2013


This is the same guy who has built several silly web projects, like the Mystical Magical Ley Line Locator and a page listing particularly creepy Facebook Graph searches.
posted by metaBugs at 10:44 AM on July 17, 2013 [1 favorite]


More Tom Scott info at his website and on Wikipedia.
posted by fredludd at 12:38 PM on July 17, 2013


On that Facebook Graph searches page he describes metafilter as "his old flame". There aren't any metafilter userid's for tomscott or tom scott. Maybe he just lurked and stole jokes.
posted by bukvich at 1:49 PM on July 17, 2013


bukvich: "and stole jokes."

What jokes do you think he stole? That seems a bit bizarre to suggest.
posted by ocherdraco at 2:01 PM on July 17, 2013


Tom's a great laugh, when I had an idea for spoof SXSW app, he coded "Is Robert Scoble In This Room", which picked up some nice buzz a few years back. It still (just about) works... http://www.isscobleinthisroom.com/
posted by ewan at 2:05 PM on July 17, 2013


These videos are great and I urge everyone to watch them.

I hope this doesn't seem controversial, bukvich, but there is just the tiniest possibility that Tom Scott chose a Mefi username that contains neither 'Tom' nor 'Scott'. One or two others of us here have done the same kind of thing.

I hope it doesn't disappoint you to learn that my real name is not in fact Mot Ty. I am however gladder than you can imagine to realise that your real name is highly likely to be Buk Vich.

That's a great name.
posted by motty at 6:45 PM on July 17, 2013 [4 favorites]


He also knows what you were doing five minutes ago.
posted by Nossidge at 8:47 AM on July 18, 2013 [2 favorites]


These are great. More people like this one please!
posted by greytape at 10:16 AM on July 18, 2013


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