There are only like three ideas in this book: 1) English is a weird Germanic language because of Celtic influence, 2) Sapir-Whorf is wrong, 3) English might have Phoenician influence. I had read this in another review, but thought that meant "these are the three /big/ ideas." No. These are the /only/ ideas in the book. Could have been a blog post. In fact, was a blog post: a fantastic blog post by McWhorter, making the same points, and directed me towards this book to learn more. It's a good funnel on his part, but feels like a scam on mine.

Anyway. McWhorter doesn't seem to know his audience. He argues for about half the book that English has Celtic influence, clearly to defend himself against other professional linguists. So is it written for them? Absolutely not; it calls fricatives "hissy sounds" and goes on a great deal about "what constitutes evidence." By all appearances, this is a book written for the layperson, except that the layperson is more than happy to take McWhorter on faith that English does in fact have Celtic influence.

Am I happy I read it? Absolutely not. Should you? No. But you should read his blog post instead. https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages