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The Secret History of the English Language by M.J. Harper – 4 stars

The jacket copy of this book reads as follows:

The story goes like this:

The Anglo-Saxons, a small, uncultured group of people from a place no longer identifiable, went to Britain, replaced the existing population, and, within 300 years, gave us the English language.

This gives rise to three possibilities:

1. These “Anglo-Saxons” are a very remarkable people.
2. History is full of surprises.
3. Historians have got it completely wrong.

This book advances the third possibility.

As delightfully snarky as this suggests, the book is learned, well-written, and quietly revolutionary. As much a manifesto urging us to overthrow our academic oppressors as a refutation of some downright silly conventional wisdom, this book asks some hard questions about academia and education today. Harper gleefully picks apart the foundation of much of what we think we know, with the eventual goal of making the whole house of cards collapse in on itself.

He is an applied epistemologist, or a member of the school of thought that “believes that everybody gets everything wrong.” From the afterword of the book:

Anybody who finds the material in The Secret History of the English Language interesting enough to wish to follow things up should head for

www.applied-epistemology.org

where they will find a whole bunch of people following up this and various other strands of organized human thought that require radical revision. However, you are strongly advised not to Google “Applied Epistemology”, because there you will be greeted by thousands of entries from and about people who claim to be involved in Applied Epistemology but who in fact have hijacked this very useful term to open yet another interminable branch in that utterly useless area of academic endeavor, Philosophy. Real Applied Epistemology deals with real trees in real forests that exist, so far as we know, whether we are observing them or not. Yes, yes, you believe that “so far as we know” is a frightfully important qualification. On second thoughts, don’t bother to join us.

Read this book. You won’t regret it.