Though it looks like a kids’ book, Janice Weaver’s The A to Z of Everyday Things reads more like an anthology of those adult pop histories that purport to reveal the significance of familiar items and ideas – “to shine some light on … remarkable unremarkable things,” as Weaver puts it in her introduction.

As the title suggests, Weaver chooses 26 things – beginning with the alphabet and the colour black, through lipstick, money, and numbers, and ending with yawning and zero – and gives for each a quick accounting of their origins and their influence in Western society. Each item gets three or four pages, densely packed with factoidal content, all of it written in a breezy, knowingly sardonic tone that occasionally borders on cynical.

That tone is the source of the book’s uneasiness. The text seems addressed to an older audience: Weaver often invokes a decidedly adult “we,” as in “we can pay our bills over the Internet.” (It is also an American audience, judging by the spelling and repeated references to the Thirteen Colonies. Didn’t early Canadians swear oaths and wear underwear and eat ice cream, too?) Weaver assumes a fair amount of knowledge in her readers, which results in some information being presented without the necessary context. The most egregious and strange example of this occurs in the chapter on holidays, where a sidebar informs us that the Nazis “were among the first to embrace the notion of paying workers while they were on holiday.” Weaver might have pointed out that the Nazis embraced a lot of other ideas, too.