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More P's & Q's TheoriesPosted by Bruce Kahl on May 28, 2000 In Reply to: Re: P's & Q's posted by James Briggs on May 28, 2000 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. 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).
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