 When lawmakers use those tools to make law, is it the linguistic meaning of their action that determines the content of the law? Greenberg says that ‘Linguistic meaning is the information that is reliably and systematically conveyed by words, sentences, and other linguistic entities.’ (see the entry on  legal interpretation,  section 2.1). But linguistic entities do not convey information, or make law. We need to remind ourselves of J.L.Austin’s slogan, and we need to remind ourselves of the lesson of the semantic sting: when an agency or a person has authority to make law, and exercises its authority lawfully (as Parliament did in imposing the Value Added Tax, or as a court does in ordering the payment of a fine), it would be absurd to think that the contribution to the law of its action is determined by the dispositions of speakers of the language to use the words of the law maker in one way or another. The content of the law made by the lawmaker is what the lawmaker did in the exercise of its lawmaking authority. That is, what it communicated by using the language it used, in the way that it did, in ‘the total speech situation’.