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zoobyshoe
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A recent program on p's and q's excited a certain amount of comment. You may recall we had dismissed one purported explanation on the origin of p's and q's (that the letters represent the consumption of pints and quarts, tracked on the chalkboards of British pubs) and passed along the more likely theory that the phrase mind your p's and q's traces back to an admonition given to children learning to draw their letters.
Plenty of listeners wrote into remind us of other popular explanations for how p's and q's came to name "something about which one ought to be careful or circumspect; best behavior." According to one theory, p's and q's are code for please and thank you. The former typesetters who wrote in had a different explanation. They described the box filled with alphabetically sorted, lower case block type, from which nimble-fingered printers selected letters. As listeners of a certain age may recall, those letters were set as mirror image of themselves: thus, b's looked like d's and p's like q's.
So have we tracked down the real origin of p's and q's? No; we have but added two more (still undocumented) theories to the pile of p's and q's hypotheses.
http://www.webster.com/cgi-bin/wftw.pl
How would "q" represent "thank you" in the case of p's and q's standing for "please" and "thank you"?
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