50bookchallenge #1/50: A B C et Cetera, Alexander & Nicholas Humez

I admit I felt a bit ripped off when I first start­ed to read A B C et Cetera: The Life & Times of the Roman Alpha­bet. I bought it think­ing it would actu­al­ly be a his­to­ry of the glyphs in the alpha­bet, the ori­gins of the par­tic­u­lar let­ter­forms we use.

Instead, this is a col­lec­tion of ety­mo­log­i­cal triv­ia, more about words than let­ters. The chap­ters begin with e.g. “A is for.…” fol­lowed by the ori­gin of the word, what lan­guages it came from, and con­tin­ue on in a mean­der­ing fash­ion through relat­ed Latin words and their more recent cousins in Eng­lish or oth­er languages.

I’m fas­ci­nat­ed by ety­mol­o­gy, so I actu­al­ly enjoyed read­ing this book, but I still feel mis­led by the sub­ti­tle. There was some infor­ma­tion about indi­vid­ual let­ters, but glyphs were by no means the focus of the book. It was well-writ­ten, wit­ty, and clever, wel­come attrib­ut­es for what could have been very dry and aca­d­e­m­ic mate­r­i­al. Instead it reads like an overe­d­u­cat­ed friend mak­ing con­ver­sa­tion, with side notes and wry jokes about his­tor­i­cal contexts.

All in all, inter­est­ing as long as you’re the sort of per­son that reads unabridged dic­tio­nar­ies for fun.