J.L. Austin and doing things with words

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Back in the 1950s, a British philosopher gave a series of 12 lectures that would forever change the way we think about language. His name was John Langshaw Austin, and he was a thin man who wore thick round glasses, pinstripe suits and a perpetual smirk. In the course of those 12 lectures, delivered at Harvard, he strode back and forth charting out a new theory he’d devised. Dr. Austin had noticed something that had been lurking in our language for years and decided to point them out. He called them speech acts.