i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

First and foremost, watch the video before reading my blog. It's only three minutes long, and I think it's really lovely. Also, the way you watch it changes if you're not watching it naively. 

If you have the time, the entire hour-long "Words" episode, is really interesting and relevant to some things we've been talking about in class.

I found that during the beginning of my first viewing, my mind was silent. I didn't automatically assign the words to the visuals until I saw the pattern, and then I was eager to go back and relate all the images to their common word.

***Spoiler below***

The video illustrates a sequence of eight polysemous*  words: play, blow, break, split , run, fly, fall, light, and space.  In one of the "split" shots you may notice they managed to fit two definitions of split into one shot.

There are also some abstract relationship concepts in there (fall and break up), that are clear only in the context of the adjacent words. If we had seen these shots without context we might have assigned other words to the images: "fight," for instance, for "break up" or "couple" for "fall."

The wordplay only works in English.  Check out this user comment:

I just don´t get it! I am not a native speaker. Please explain it to me. Thank you very much
kerstin

 I'd love to see this done in another language. 

*They are more or less polysemous. Some are a little tangential, like runway and break up.