This is a display of taking advantage of ruby 2.1 returning a symbol representation of methods when created and passing it to private as a single argument.

saving_private_ruby.rb

class Test
    # :( wish this worked
  private def self.bar
    puts "self bar"
  end

  # would be nice to not have to do this
  class << self
    private def nook
      puts "self nook"
    end
  end
  
  # not private!
  def foo
    puts "foo"
  end
end

test = Test.new
test.foo #=> "foo"
Test.bar #=> "bar" -- :(
Test.nook #=> private method `nook' called for Test:Class (NoMethodError) -- YAY!