Things you've slipped into a conlang?

[Jonlang]

This could be interesting. Has anyone here ever slipped in little references to their favourite things (books, TV shows, movies, natlangs, conlangs) into their conlangs? Or put something like a private joke in there?

An example of mine is the word cuts /kʊts/ which is similar to the Wenglish word "cwtch" /kʊtʃ/ which means to cuddle, hug (and has an extended meaning of a small cupboard or small, snug room but this meaning isn't extended into my conlang). The Wenglish word has gained much greater popularity in the UK because of TV shows like Gavin & Stacey and The Valleys and is now very often seen written on cushions and bedding, and memes are seen on Facebook every so often with things like "Anyone can cuddle, but only the Welsh can cwtch".

So what have you given a nod to in your conlangs?

[Frislander]

Well I did once use the sentence "You must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest ... with ... a herring!" as an example sentence.

[zyxw59]

One of my conlangs has the root "mxəl", meaning "to eat", after a friend of mine named Michael who is (in)famous among our friend group for his ability to quickly devour burritos and food in general.

[Vijay]

I only have one conlang, and I use it with my dad all the time, so we probably make references to inside jokes in it. The only one I can remember, though, is something like [ɔːˈɳaːʃ] 'to turn on (e.g. a switch)' (also 'to open a garage'), and its antonym [ɔːˈfaːʃ]. [ɔːˈɳaːʃ] is a term that my dad has long used with me (and perhaps my brother) because when I was little, I used to use a CD program for learning French, German, and Spanish. The program had various exercises (and the same set of exercises for each language), one of which involved following some instructions to help bake a cake with the last instruction basically being "turn on the blender." Unfortunately, the software was shitty, so no matter what you did before turning on the blender in any language, the blender would always explode (or rather, pop open, at which point the mixture would be splashed all over the kitchen), and the program would decide you must have done something wrong and encourage you in the target language to try again. The fatal instruction to turn on the blender in French was mettez le mixeur en marche, which my dad has always pronounced as something like [mɛˈtəl mikˈsi ɔːˈɳaːʃ] (mixie happens to be Indian English for 'blender'), and [ɔːˈɳaːʃ] has been part of our daily vocabulary ever since. [ɔːˈfaːʃ] was just derived by analogy. Both have made it into our conlang.

[spanick]

There are a few of these little jokes I sprinkle throughout but the one I immediately thought of was <nam> which I've used to mean "to eat" or "food" a few times as a joke based on "nomnomnom" (an onomatopoeia for eating sounds). I also like to work in real world roots, for example a couple conlanging of mine have had roots for this related to books or writing that had the letters KTB, from Semitic languages.