The private language problem has long held a central place in the philosophy of language. It does so in part because two difficult questions meet there: what role sensations play in meaning, and what it is to follow a rule. Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding already contains a tacit argument for the privacy of language. Wittgenstein, in the Philosophical Investigations, turns that argument into a series of thought experiments whose method is grammatical rather than demonstrative. This paper sets aside the attempt at another comprehensive reading. It asks two narrower questions. Can the meaning of sensation words rest on private objects? Is a private rule possible once public criteria of correctness are removed? Ayer, Cook, and Kripke give different answers. Drawing on recent scholarship, we argue that Wittgenstein's work is closer to therapy than to refutation, and that Kripke's rule-skepticism, while philosophically powerful, marks a hermeneutic shift. The most important step in the argument, on this reading, is the treatment of privacy claims as meaningless grammatical propositions.