G'day, humans. Welcome to the show that doesn't deal in absolutes, that doesn't deal in blacks and whites.

So many shows, so many politicians, so many commentators, so much of your social media feed

expects either your agreement or disagreement, either your furious love or your furious anger.

I do not.

I ask only that we give each other the benefit of the doubt,

that we wrestle with ideas we reject, as well as those we think are right.

Let's escape the dogmas of conventional wisdom.

Let's have conversations that straddle the cultural divide

and make us all just a little uncomfortable.

Today on the show, why do we seem to be getting worse and worse at understanding each other?

Why is there such a gulf?

Why are there so many taboos?

Is cancel culture an honest way of trying to hold people to account?

Or are the shifting sands of terminology too demanding and too fast to keep track of?

And are they other people being

executed in bad faith when they transgress? All of this was swirling around in my head

when I invited Nick Enfield onto the show. Nick is a linguist. So he spends a lot of time

thinking about how we use language and how taboos evolve and what we're really doing when we seem to be communicating

with each other. He's a professor at the University of Sydney, a professor of linguistics. He's

also the director of the Sydney Social Science and Humanities Advanced Research Center. He's the head

of a research excellence initiative on the crisis of post-truth discourse and his research on language

and culture and cognition and social life is fed into by a long history of his work in

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