The performative dimension of language anticipated by Nietzsche and theorised by Austin reveals that our uses of language have effects in the world and that mastering a language is a way of controlling these effects to a certain extent. In Wittgenstein’s words: ‘To understand a language means to have mastered a technique’ (PI 199). Mastering a language is not just a matter of grammar and vocabulary but a pragmatic understanding of how to do things with words. This is Austin’s discovery: when we use language, we are not only describing the world but we are doing something to it. And when we do something, we usually do it with a certain intention that is either located in the action itself or a means to do something else (two of the aspects of Elizabeth Anscombe’s analysis of intention). I will come back to intentionality in Chap. 3 as it is crucial to understand Austin’s distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary forces. Both forces however show that our uses of language are doing, or failing to do, what we had intended, with varying degrees of intentionality and control.