Our frequent visitor from Zimbabwe, Rotarian John Travlos, introduced today’s Speaker – Dr Bill Louw, a Linguist and Philosopher who amongst other things analyses verbal, written and coded texts. Bill is an alumni Rotarian and a Paul Harris Fellow, and his topic was “Applying ‘Is It The Truth’ (the first tenet of the Rotary Four Way Test) to linguistic tricks, subtexts and security secret codes”. What a fascinating and mind-boggling talk it was! Algorithms are a set of rules that are usually used in problem solving calculations, but Bill created the first non-mathematical algorithm and this enabled him to be involved in the production of the Cobuild Dictionary. This is a body of English language texts which, through logical positivism, assists philosophers to find the truth using logical proof. Some of the approaches to truth can be brutal, but Rotary’s quest is to find truth in a non-brutal way. Logical positivism was introduced in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but by the 1960s it had lost some traction. Bill gave us a comprehensive history of who was involved, including a few well known names such as Bertrand Russell, and Bill is now working towards its revival. The Cobuild Corpus consists of several billion words, and this data reveals how words are used, which ones are used together, and how often they are used. Linguistic tricks, falsities and subtexts can be detected and codes decoded through linguistics. To find the truth, follow the censorship! Bill has an enviable global reputation in his field, and we thank him for provoking our thoughts so well!