This paper adopts an autobiographical tone to review the linguistic turn and its demise at the hands Richard Rorty. Rorty, along with Continental philosophers like Lyotard rescued us from a philosophical delusion that we might achieve a neutral analysis resulting in linguistic and conceptual hygiene. This view became the basis of a highly influential doctrine in philosophy of education during the 1970s under R. S. Peters and the London school. I review the Wittgensteininspired movement and its conceptual affinities with postpositivism, postmodernism and postcoloniality as the dominating motifs of the age we have now passed beyond. © Michael A. Peters.