ABC Et Cetera: The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet

ABC Et Cetera does for the Romans what the Humez bros.' earlier Alpha to Omega did for the Greeks, providing the reader with a letter-by-letter series of short-chapter slices of Roman culture and its influences down to the present day, such as H for Hannibal (the Punic wars against Carthage, Rome's most significant Other and nemesis), L for legal (Roman law and its alive-and-well descendants today, including community property laws governing division of marital assets in divorce), P for Peter, Paul, and pontiff (how pagan Rome came to be the center of Catholic Christianity). The primacy of Latin-origin words in English, and of Roman culture beneath the subsequent history of Europe and the Americas, makes this book a must-read for anyone interested in our language and why we think in it the way we do; as with their other books, Alexander and Nicholas Humez make a plausible case here for their thesis that words and the ideas we use to express them constitute a two-way street.

This book gives the history of latin words, letter by letter. How they came to be and how the meaning of words have changed over the years enlightens the reader. Entertaining reading as well as informative. If you are at all interested in word origins, this is the book for you.

"A-B-C Et Cetera" is funny and entertaining while at the same time informative and enlightening. I use this book in my classroom all the time, and my Latin students love it. The Humez Brothers have a knack for making a "once upon a time" anecdote about Rome an etymological and educational challenge!