Re: Ps & Qs

Posted by ESC on September 14, 2000

In Reply to: Phrases posted by robin jones on September 14, 2000

: watch your P's and Q's, what does the p and q stand for?????

From the archives:

There have been several theories posted on Phrase Finder about "minding your P's and Q's."

To mind your Ps and Qs is to be careful; cautious. The Ps here are said to be pints and the Qs to be quarts. The publican "chalks up" or "puts on the slate" the drinks supplied to customers; they must be aware of how much they have drunk or their bills will be unexpectedly large.

An alternative view is that P derives from the French pied=foot and the Q comes from queue=tail(of a wig) and that the whole saying is based on 18th century court etiquette.

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.

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.

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".

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