Mum said to me as a kid watch you P`s and Q`s,what was the meaning of the P and Q ?

Question

Can`t ask her she is dead

Answer 1

hope this answers your question...
MIND YOUR PS AND QS
A puzzling and quirky idiom
There has recently been a discussion on the Usenet newsgroup alt.usage.english about this somewhat outdated saying. As so often happens, a series of posters have recounted the explanations they’ve heard about its origins without really advancing the discussion. It would be difficult to reach a conclusion in any case, as the facts to base it on have been lost. All we can do is theorise, which can be fun, but it does tend to generate more heat than light. Here, for what its worth, are the facts so far as I know them.

Its meaning in recent times—and the one I learned as a child in west London nearly 50 years ago—has been “to mind one’s manners”, “to behave properly”. This is a weakened sense to the one it had in the nineteenth century, when it meant, according to Eric Partridge in A Dictionary of Historical Slang: “to be careful, exact, or prudent in behaviour”.

These are some of the explanations I’ve seen advanced in various places:

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 2

Meaning

Be on your best behaviour and be careful of your language.

Origin

There are various proposed explanations of this. Amongst the most plausible are the notion that ale used to be ordered in either pints or quarts and you needed to be careful which you were given. The fact that typesetters needed to be careful when setting type because the 'p's and 'q's looked similar seems a better explanation. A third, from Melissa Shenker, is 'mind your pleases and thankyous'. This has the merit of being closer to the meaning of the phrase although the thankyous = thank 'q's stretches the imagination somewhat.

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Answer 3

Mind your P's and Q's
Meaning: Behave properly.
Example: Since his drunk driving arrest, he has been minding his Ps and Qs.

Origin: Comes from the early pub days when beer and ale was served in pint and quart containers. The tab was kept on a chalkboard used to count the pints and quarts consumed. To watch your Ps and Qs is to control your alcoholic intake and behavior.
Not only did pub keepers maintain the count of pints and quarts consumed, they often maintained a tab for regular customers, especially sailors. The sailors tab was sometimes paid directly out of the sailors pay by the ship's captain. This to assure the pub keeper of payment.

However, this created the opportunity for the pub keeper to charge for a few extra pints and quarts. And in some cases the captain was in on this little deception, and shared in the extra payment. Hence it was to the sailors best interest to keep count of the pints and quarts. To mind his Ps and Qs.

Alternative: Lower case Ps and Qs look similar and can be mistaken for each other. When setting moveable type printing presses, "minding your Ps and Qs" is important.

Similarly, a person just learning how to write could easily confuse lower case Ps and Qs. Hence a need to be careful and "mind your P's and Q's".

Alternative: Ps and Qs may just be a childish word play for "please and thank yous"! Certainly this seems to fit with the accepted meaning.

Answer 4

After giving this some thought, I should guess that its something to with reading and writing in a way, P & Q typed in lower case p & q are not disimilar, but could cause some confusion if used wrongly, so is same with life in general, in other words, watch what you say or do which may be mis understood?

Answer 5

hope this answers your question...
MIND YOUR PS AND QS
A puzzling and quirky idiom
There has recently been a discussion on the Usenet newsgroup alt.usage.english about this somewhat outdated saying. As so often happens, a series of posters have recounted the explanations they’ve heard about its origins without really advancing the discussion. It would be difficult to reach a conclusion in any case, as the facts to base it on have been lost. All we can do is theorise, which can be fun, but it does tend to generate more heat than light. Here, for what its worth, are the facts so far as I know them.

Its meaning in recent times—and the one I learned as a child in west London nearly 50 years ago—has been “to mind one’s manners”, “to behave properly”. This is a weakened sense to the one it had in the nineteenth century, when it meant, according to Eric Partridge in A Dictionary of Historical Slang: “to be careful, exact, or prudent in behaviour”.

These are some of the explanations I’ve seen advanced in various places:

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 6

This axiom, regardless of its origins, has been common in post-victorian Britain as an abbreviation of 'to mind your manners' or, more specifically, to say both 'please' (p's) and 'thankyou' (thank-Q).
Thus the phrase 'watch your p's and q's' has been in use to encourage people to speak politely, especially children, who remember such phrases better than just instructions.

Answer 7

Mind your Pleases and ThanQs. Still a bit of a bizarre saying though..

Answer 8

Say Please and Thank You. An artform that appears to have been lost in this country since the advent of the "what u looking at", "oi", and "innit" culture that has so kindly and mercilessly been bestowed upon us.

Answer 9

Lowercase p and q look similar. So, you mind them when you're writing.
So when someone tells you to mind your p's and q's they're telling you to watch what you're doing.

Answer 10

ask her