During World War II Austin served in the British Intelligence Corps. It has been said of him that, "he more than anybody was responsible for the life-saving accuracy of the D-Day intelligence" (reported in Warnock 1963: 9). Austin left the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel and was honored for his intelligence work with an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire), the French Croix de guerre, and the U.S. Officer of the Legion of Merit. After the war Austin became White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, as a Professorial Fellow of Corpus Christi College. Publishing little, his influence would largely make itself felt through his teaching in lectures and tutorials and, especially, his famous ‘Saturday morning meetings’. Austin visited Harvard and Berkeley in the mid-fifties, in 1955 delivering the William James Lectures at Harvard that would become "How to Do Things With Words", and offering a seminar on excuses whose material would find its way into "A Plea for Excuses". It was at this time that he met and befriended Noam Chomsky. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1956 to 1957. Austin died, shortly after being diagnosed with lung cancer, at the age of 48. At the time, he was developing a semantic theory based on sound symbolism, using the English gl-words as data. "How to Do Things with Words" (1955/1962) is perhaps Austin's most influential work. In contrast to the positivist view, he argues, sentences with truth-values form only a small part of the range of utterances. After introducing several kinds of sentences which he asserts are neither true nor false, he turns in particular to one of these kinds of sentences, which he calls "performative utterances" or just "performatives". These he characterises by two features:   He goes on to say that when something goes wrong in connection with a performative utterance it is, as he puts it, "infelicitous", or "unhappy" rather than false. The action which is performed when a 'performative utterance' is issued belongs to what Austin later calls a "speech-act" (more particularly, the kind of action Austin has in mind is what he subsequently terms the "illocutionary act"). For example, if you say "I name this ship the "Queen Elizabeth"," and the circumstances are appropriate in certain ways, then you will have done something special, namely, you will have performed the act of naming the ship.