What is the origin of the saying "mind your P's and Q's"?

Question

ive heard this saying LOTS of times and i have no idea wtf it means

i know it means mind your manners, but what do P's and Q's stand for?

Answer 1

The date of the coinage of mind your Ps and Qs is uncertain. The OED used to print a citation from 1779 but, as they have now withdrawn it from the online version of the dictionary, presumably they consider it unreliable.

So, the meaning, spelling and coinage of the phrase are all debatable. Now we come to what is really uncertain - the derivation. Nevertheless, it is one of those phrases that people know the origin of. When pressed all that really means is that the person they heard explain the origin had made a random choice from the list of proposed derivations below. As no one knows the origin I'll just list those suggestions - mind your ps and qs probably derives from one of these:

- Mind your pints and quarts. This is suggested as deriving from the practise of chalking up a tally of drinks in English pubs (on the slate). Publicans had to make sure to mark up the quart drinks as distinct from the pint drinks. This explanation is widely repeated but there's little to support it, apart from the fact that pint and quart begin with p and q.

- Advice to printer’s apprentices to avoid confusing the backward-facing metal type lowercase Ps and Qs. I've never heard any suggestion that printer should mind their ds and bs though, even though that has the benefit of rhyming, which would have made it a more attractive slogan.

- Mind your pea (jacket) and queue (wig). Pea jackets were short, rough woollen overcoats, commonly worn by sailors in the 18th century. Perruques were full wigs worn by fashionable gentlemen. It is difficult to imagine the need for an expression to warn people to avoid confusing them.

- Mind your pieds (feet) and queues (wigs). This is suggested to have been an instruction given by French dancing masters to their charges. This has the benefit of placing the perruque in the right context - so long as we accept the phrase as being originally French. There's no reason to suppose it is from France and no version of the phrase exists in French.

- It is advice to children learning to write to take care not to mix up the lower-case letters p and q. Again, the 'd' and 'b' counter argument applies.

- It derived as reminder to children to be polite. This is supposed to be as a form of 'mind your pleases and thank-yous' - 'mind you pleases and kyous'. Pretty far-fetched that one.

- P and q stands for "prime quality." There is, or rather was as this now seems to have also been withdrawn, a 1612 citation which links PQ with 'prime quality'. If that's the origin why isn't the phrase mind your PQ?

So, pay nothing and take your choice. For what it's worth, my virtual two-penneth goes to the advice to children who were learning to write.

Answer 2

There are numerous theories about the origin of the phrase. One is that it began in British pubs as an abbreviation for "mind your pints and quarts." Supposedly, this warned the bartender to serve full measure, mark the customer's tab accurately, etc. Alternatively, it could be a warning to customers that they are misbehaving due to being drunk (from having too many "pints and quarts"), or even a way of telling the bartender to mind his own business (as in mind his drinks, rather than the customers).

Another suggestion is that the phrase originated in the printing trade, at the time when printing presses used movable type set by hand. When looking at the type, all the letters are in mirror image so that they will print on paper correctly. Because the letters "p" and "q" look very similar and were stored side by side in the type cases, it was easy for a typesetter to pull a letter from the wrong slot and not notice this. When the type was removed from the press and sorted back into the type cases, mixing Qs with Ps was likely unless care was taken. A similar theory tells of a teacher instructing a young student to write Ps and Qs appropriately, as they look similar.

Still another theory hypothesizes that the term might be in some way connected to the phrase "peace and quiet."

Yet another theory holds the phrase's origin with early logicians, who used P and Q in their basic formulation of arguments much as mathematicians use X and Y; thus a master logician encouraging his students to "mind your Ps and Qs" prior to an exam was imploring diligence in their work

In 1745 Francis I purportedly demanded that his troops mind their Ps and Qs. In the late 1800s the phrase gained popularity in Victorian households.

Answer 3

I have seen various answers but the one that I like best is from the earlier days of printing, when the type was set by hand, one letter or space at a time. So that it will print properly it must be set as a mirror image, from left to right. Also, in common lower case fonts, the letters "p" and "q" are mirror images of one another so minding your "p's and q's" meant to be careful to not mix them up.

It was later applied to behavior, etc.

Answer 4

I believe it comes from when newspapers were printed a page at a time and somebody had to actually set the type by hand....the p and q could be easily mixed up when the type setter was taking the metal type blocks out of the tray

Answer 5

mind your Pints and Quarts. it was a saying that originated in bars, I believe in England. When a barfight would break out, the bartender would yell out to mind your Pints and Quarts to the customers, so they wouldnt be knocked onto the floor and break...