Welcome to the Quilette Podcast. I'm your host Iona Italia, the managing editor at

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Quilett social events. My guest today is Nick Enfield. Nick is a linguistic anthropologist

and he is professor of linguistics at Sydney University.

He is the author of three books,

Why We Talk, Consequences of Language

and Language versus Reality, which is subtitled, I think it's why language is good for lawyers

and bad for scientists.

And it's that latter book that we're going to talk about today. Welcome Nick.

Thanks for having me.

So I'd like to start by looking at a concept which is central to your book and that's the idea that language

is a means of coordination, that it's a tool that's used in coordination games between people.

And for this concept you lean quite heavily on an idea that was pioneered by the economist Shelling.

I've forgotten his first name, Thomas Ernest Erwin Shelling from the 1960s and Shelling's idea is probably most easily illustrated with an example that he gives of two parachutists. So two parachutists land in enemy territory and they've got to find

each other and meet up and they both have a map of the territory and they each know that the other person has that map as well.

And in the center of the map is a bridge across a river and all of the local roads are leading to that bridge.

So the two parachutors, each independently without being able to communicate with each other, likely to go and meet on that bridge.

And that is, the bridge in that example is known as a shelling point.

So it's a kind of the opposite of the prisoners dilemma in that this kind of

coordination depends upon agreeing on certain conspicuous landmarks and not only that are not only

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