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P's and Q's
Means to learn one's letters. Dates back to the late 18th century. Some
people think it refers to the hard time children had learning to distinguish
between the letters p and q, since they are mirror images of one another.
We received these emails from site visitors:
Email 1: P’s n Q’s: it actually means, Mind your Pints and Quarts. In
Pubs when people would start arguing, the bartenders would tell them to
mind their own drinks... being pints n quarts!
Email 2: I always thought that Mind your P's and Q's meant to behave appropriately.
Also I thought it meant that if you don't mind your P's and Q's You are
irresponsible Because if P's and Q's were referred to as Penny's and Quarters
and nobody minded or paid attention to them and you lost them then you
would have lost your Pennies and Quarters, or P's and Q's.
Email 3: The most convincing explanation of this idiom I've heard is that it comes
from the early days of printing, when movable type was positioned for
printing. This process was done upside-down - a technique not impossible
to
get used to after some time. However, the lowercase letters p and q were
hard to distinguish, since in most designs they were mirror images of
each
other. Hence" mind your P's and Q's!", a phrase I was told was
shouted at
young children working in these print shops.
Email 4: I am under the impression that the saying minding your p's and q's, does
mean mind your pints and quarts. Bartenders would use tally marks i.e.
4
pints equal a quart, if the customer got out of line, the bartender would
use the phrase, mind your p's and q's. I have also heard the customer
would
use it when they thought they were being over charged.
Email 5: I have heared a different story about the saying mind your p's and q's. Back when Mark Twain lived in Missouri or as he liked to call it Missary, he had a horrable job working as a newspaper editor. The job was to put the letters that were to make all the words on the page in sentence form backwords. There was an upper case and lower case (thuse the use of that idiom) and Mark Twain once wrote in a news article about the two letters in the English alphabete that were mirror images of themselves. He said, "no mater how hard he tried he could never mind his p's and q's". This means that when he did his job he had to make sure that if he choose a q it was really a p and not a q but when printed it was backward so if it was a p it was really a q and vise versa.
Email 6: As a bartender for 16 years, you've got 1/2 the stoy right. In the days of old in taverns and pubs, mind your p's and q's was a term the bar owner or manager said at the end of the night to the waitresses or cocktail girls. They kept track of what they sold by marking P's and Q's on a peice of paper for all the pints and quarts they sold or disbursed. The bar owner would say, "Mind your P's and Q's, (pints and quarts). That meant for them to tally up their P's and Q's and give a total.
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