Interesting comment from the video remarks:
I am a linguist of Jewish ancestry who has worked in Bible translation. You are correct about the "cross" problem with the JWs.
Remember that the incidents reported in the New Testament took place in the languages of Aramaic, spoken by the Jews, and Latin which was the language used by the Romans--nothing happened in Greek. (The Jews stopped speaking Hebrew before the Babylonian exile and only used it when reading the Bible in the synagogue like today.)
Greek was used as the "lingua franca" so that people across the Roman Empire who spoke a plethera of different tongues could understand the gospel (it was the "common language" of the Empire due to the previous Hellenization under Alexander the Great.)
Everything that happened, including the crucifixion, had to be translated into Koine Greek--but the cross was a new invention by the Romans and there was no word for it in Greek. So they used the word STAUROS for it, but it was imprecise. as STAUROS only means pole.
The Roman instrument of torture, the cross used a pole, a crossbeam, and a small foot rest to induce a slow means of suffication to victims who were stripped nude and forced to urinate and empty their bowels upon themselves over a period of several days until they died in front of passersby.
Another word, XYLON meaning "tree" is used by Luke and Peter after Jesus is resurrected for theological purposes because Christians likened the Cross to the "Tree of Life" from the Garden of Eden. The Church Fathers also used XYLON for the Cross and created an entire theology based on this.