This is a book about the Roman alphabet and the people who used it as a medium for the transmission of their civilization. Primarily, this means the Romans and their Italic subjects, speakers of Latin who disseminated the language, and the culture of which it was an expression, throughout Europe and the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. As speakers, readers, and writers of English, we are greatly indebted to the long line of purveyors of Latin in its various forms. When words are borrowed, concepts come with them. So, if we have borrowed a wide variety of Latin words, it follows that we have also borrowed a great deal of the cultural stuff that they encase. This book takes a look at what the authors consider to be some of the more intriguing cultural/linguistic goodies that have crept willy-nilly into the English language over the ages from the Latin cornucopia. - Preamble.

It is a miscellany of commentaries on absurdities prevalent in American societysuch as sleazy television fare, fraudulent and inaccurate language, Christian values, and the justice system. The author means to edify readers with his criticism in an attempt to make American society more sophisticated.

"A continuing thread in Introduction is Timasheff's interest in the dialectical interplay between the positive law and the living law. What is more, he discusses at length what he considers to be the essential systems of thought and action in the social sciences. Timasheff sees sociology's purpose as the study of similar, related, or clusters of social phenomena. Accordingly, Timasheff's focus is principally on the law's causal reality."--BOOK JACKET.

In the first offering of this beloved duo, the Humez brothers take on the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet (plus those elusive "dead letters"), and through the device of the abecedarium bring the Greek culture and thought to life. From acoustics to zygote, they provide not only an engaging romp through the Greek language but also a series of glimpses into the world and man's place in it. The historical, philosophical, mathematical, cosmological, and political (all Greek words) approaches we take toward life, its description, elucidation, and evaluation, are all mainly derived from several thousand years of Greek culture. The vocabulary of language is a mirror of the minds of its speakers, and in this book we see the first reflections of the modern world.

Richly illustrated with often antic images from alphabet books and primers, The Story of A relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance. Offering a poetics of alphabetization and explicating the alphabet's tropes and rhetorical strategies, the author demonstrates the far-reaching cultural power of such apparently neutral statements as "A is for apple." The new market for children's books in the eighteenth century established for the "republic of ABC" a cultural potency equivalent to its high-culture counterpart, the "republic of letters," while shaping its child-readers into consumers. As a central rite of socialization, alphabetization schooled children to conflicting expectations, as well as to changing models of authority, understandings of the world, and uses of literature. In the nineteenth century, literacy became a crucial aspect of American middle-class personality and subjectivity. Furnishing the readers and writers needed for a national literature, the alphabetization of America between 1800 and 1850 informed the sentimental-reform novel as well as the self-consciously aesthetic novel of the 1850s. Through readings of conduct manuals, reading primers, and a sentimental bestseller, the author shows how the alphabet became embedded in a maternal narrative, which organized the world through domestic affections. Nathaniel Hawthorne, by contrast, insisted on the artificiality of the alphabet and its practices in his antimimetic, hermetic The Scarlet Letter, with its insistent focus on the letter A. By understanding this novel as part of the network of alphabetization, The Story of A accounts for its uniquely persistent cultural role. The author concludes, in an epilogue, with a reading of postmodern alphabets and their implications for the future of literacy.