What Are the Real Origins of the Phrase Mind Your p's and q's?

[zoobyshoe]

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"?

 

[Moonbear]

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"?

That's the part I've never understood. And I don't see how any of those explanations somehow translate into pleases and thank yous either. Unless people have always been notoriously bad spellers...thanq you?

Could it have come from another language? Is there a language where the respective words for please and thank-you start with "p" and "q"? Or, is q a shorthand way to write "thank you?" Perhaps something from the days of calling cards left in a bowl at the door?

 

[brewnog]

I was always under the impression that it was just the typographers saying, - the P's and Q's in letterpress type are obviously reversed, and at first glance look like the one which they're not! Never seen it to be anything else, really.

 

[Danger]

I always figured that it was a sign on a pool-hall washroom wall.

 

[zoobyshoe]

A warning to sloppy ornithologists, "Mind your plovers and quails" ?

 

[honestrosewater]

I don't really have an opinion about this, but thank you is pronounced as thang Q, and please does seem to contain pees in a somewhat similar manner. It's rather sloppy, but these things can be. Just the other day, I discovered the idiom 'kicks with the other foot', which someone claimed that Dubliners use in order to say that a man is gay. (I actually did try to deduce the meaning of that one at first, but gave up after a bit of chuckling and eyebrow gymnastics.) I saw one explanation that it originally meant that someone was of another religion and referred to some difference in the way people who were associated with two different religions played some sport (literally kicking with another foot under some conditions). Who knows?

 

[zoobyshoe]

...eyebrow gymnastics.

Incidentally, who won the gold this year?

 

[BobG]

I was always under the impression that it was just the typographers saying, - the P's and Q's in letterpress type are obviously reversed, and at first glance look like the one which they're not! Never seen it to be anything else, really.

How could a typesetter confuse the two since they face opposite directions?

It would make more sense to say, "Mind your d's and p's." or, "Mind your b's and q's." Since p is just d rotated 180 degrees, it would be easy for an apprentice typesetter to confuse the two. Likewise for b's and q's. Likewise for n's and u's, for that matter. A blonde apprentice could spend hours trying to figure out the difference between those letters.

 

[zoobyshoe]

p and q are right next to each other in the alphabet and I expect the bins of type were right next to each other as well. The letters appear reversed on the type, so if you're not minding it, it would be easy for an apprentise to pick up the wrong piece of type

 

[BobG]

p and q are right next to each other in the alphabet and I expect the bins of type were right next to each other as well.

Do they actually have bins for n, p, and q?

 

[zoobyshoe]

Do they actually have bins for n, p, and q?

In high school we had a little printing press and typesetting was an extra curricular activity anyone could do. I tried it a couple/three times. All the letters were each in a bin of their own, yes. I don't know to what extent our little setup was similar to an authentic newspaper or publishing house, though.

 

[honestrosewater]

Incidentally, who won the gold this year?

Why, Vincent Price, of course.