What does the "P" and "Q" mean when someone tells you to "Mind your P'sand Q's?"

Question

I have asked countles people, and no one has been able to answer this for me yet...

Answer 1

i used to think LMNO was one letter when it was said in the alphabet song.



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P's and Q's (Mind Your 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.



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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!

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.

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.

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..

Answer 2

There are various credible explainations of the source of the saying including

Advice to a child learning its letters to be careful not to mix up the handwritten lower-case letters p and q.
Similar advice to a printer’s apprentice, for whom the backward-facing metal type letters would be especially confusing.
Jocular, or perhaps deadly serious, advice to a barman not to confuse the letters p and q on the tally slate, on which the letters stood for the pints and quarts consumed “on tick” by the patrons.
An abbreviation of mind your please’s and thank-you’s.
Instructions from a French dancing master to be sure to perform the dance figures pieds and queues accurately.
An admonishment to seamen not to soil their navy pea-jackets with their tarred queues, that is, their pigtails.
It is possible to put forward objections to all of these. Why should p and q be singled out for attention in handwriting, when similar problems occur with b and d? This comment might be thought to apply with even greater force to the poor printer’s apprentice. The pints and quarts explanation sounds reasonable, provided that men in bars used to drink beer by the quart, as in fact they did. The French dancing-master explanation sounds just too far-fetched to be credible, as does the one about the seamen. The mind your please’s and thank-you’s seems just as unlikely as the others, but is seriously advanced by some dictionaries, the current edition of the Collins English Dictionary among them.

There are two similar usages recorded:

There was once an expression P and Q, often written pee and kew, which was a seventeenth-century colloquial expression for “prime quality”. This later became a dialect expression (the English Dialect Dictionary reports it in Victorian times from Shropshire and Herefordshire). OED2 has a citation from Rowlands’ Knave of Harts of 1612: “Bring in a quart of Maligo, right true: And looke, you Rogue, that it be Pee and Kew.” Nobody is really sure what either P or Q stood for. To say they’re the initials of “Prime Quality” seems to be folk etymology, because surely that would make “PQ” rather than “P and Q”.
Partridge says that the phrase learn your Ps and Qs, was common about 1820, again being advice to children who may be confused about the two letters.
You may feel the first of these tends to confuse the issue rather than illuminate it, and you may be right. It may just be coincidence. However, the second does tend to support the idea that it relates to children learning their alphabets. If I had to make a choice, I’d plump for the alphabet-learning origin.

What we do know is that mind your Ps and Qs was first recorded in 1779 but that it is slowly dying out. To lose it would be a pity, as it is a link to the past and makes a good subject for some quiet speculation and ingenious attempts at explanation. In common with so many words and phrases in English, its origins must remain a mystery.

Answer 3

The advice from the typing teachers was "mind your Pees and Ques".<

Answer 4

From an old printer's axiom. Back in the early days of printing presses, each line of text had to be set up one letter at a time. Since the letters in the press were reversed (so they'd print forward), the printmaker (or typographer) needed to be careful not to confuse one letter for the other.
Reminding someone to "watch his p's and q's" means to pay attention to the details

Answer 5

To mind your manners;

P = Please
Q = Thank you

I have seen this in a children's story book where a girl has no manners and so she was sent to an aunt who is very strict. She never said "please" or "thank you", so her aunt came up with an idea. The moment this girl forgot to say "please", she will sew a letter "P" onto the girl's dress and the same goes when she forgot to say "thank you", she will have a "Q" sewn on.

I think maybe someone else may know.

Answer 6

P's and Q's are knitting terms. A "P" is a loop (Pearl is one type) and a "Q" is pulling the yarn through (Knot). If you are minding your P's and Q's while you are knitting, your weave will be straight and without kinks. The phrase was borrowed from this method.

Answer 7

It was a term used during the old days when women used to tell their men to watch their pints and quarts. It later got shortened to p's and q's.

Answer 8

You have some pretty smart cookies, giving excellent answers, so there is nothing more for me to add.

Made interesting reading.

Answer 9

it started as a bar phrase mind your "P"ints and "Q"uarts. then it evolved to minding your manners. and then used for children as a reminder not to mix the two letters when writing
thats all i could find about it

Answer 10

I have heard the "pints and quarts" theory as well as the printing press theory. Don't think you can narrow it down more than that.
(I also used to think lmno was one letter!)