Since this phrase is actually used in the Agora in the spelling department, I am curious about its origin. I heard one explanation for p’s & q’s, but I confess that it came from an episode of The Sopranos, and you just can’t trust Hollywood. (Their explanation was that it comes from ale being served in pints and quarts, and therefore is a warning to watch one’s alcohol consumption.)
[quote author=dgale link=board=idiom;num=1036700677;start=0#0 date=11/07/02 at 15:24:37](Their explanation was that it comes from ale being served in pints and quarts, and therefore is a warning to watch one’s alcohol consumption.)
Hadn’t heard that version. The ale story I know was an instruction to the barman who was running a customer’s tab by marking p’s or q’s for each pint or quart ordered. Care was required not to confuse these, and therefore total the tab wrongly.
Or:
More plausibly, a warning to typesetters, who might easily confuse these two letters. (Could have ended up as "Mind your b’s and d’s.")
Well, all three explanations given so far seem believable. I’m just wondering if there is a definitive origin, or if it’s one of those phrases that have multiple origins.
One I don’t find believable is the story that French dancing masters in the days of Louis XIV would tell their pupils to mind their pieds et queues - supposedly, to watch their feet and also ensure that their wigs didn’t fall off. Unfortunately for this story, the French word for wig is perruque - and though the tail at the back of an eighteenth-century wig might be called a queue in English, I think it would be a queue de cheval in French.
Stargzer?
[quote author=granthutchison link=board=idiom;num=1036700677;start=0#5 date=11/07/02 at 17:51:47]One I don’t find believable is the story that French dancing masters in the days of Louis XIV would tell their pupils to mind their pieds et queues - supposedly, to watch their feet and also ensure that their wigs didn’t fall off. Unfortunately for this story, the French word for wig is perruque - and though the tail at the back of an eighteenth-century wig might be called a queue in English, I think it would be a queue de cheval in French.
Funny, this is the only version I have heard. Ain’t neccesarily so…
[quote author=granthutchison link=board=idiom;num=1036700677;start=0#5 date=11/07/02 at 17:51:47] . . . and though the tail at the back of an eighteenth-century wig might be called a queue in English, I think it would be a queue de cheval in French.
Stargzer?
Grant
Talking about me again? Not up on my 18th-century French, but I do have this straight from the horse’s mouth: "In any organization, the ratio of southern ends of northbound horses to the total number of northbound horses is always greater than one." Or as George M. Cohan said: "The trouble with casting a horse on Broadway is that you always have trouble casting the front half."
[hr]
When I was a young rapscallion my father told me it stood for "Mind your politenesses and quitenesses." It figures a parent would come up with something like that.
I knew I’d seen this before. Bergen Evans, in Comfortable Words, says:
"Mind means "be careful of." Beyond that all is conjecture.
He mentions the pints and quarts in the alehouse, but says the Pieds and Queues is a doubtful explanation. He states that another version says:
. . . it’s advice from sailors’ wives to their husbands warning them to be careful not to get the tar from their queues onto their pea-jackets. Sailors did tar their hair and wore it in queues long after it was stylish to do so elsewhere. A quotation from a play by Thomas Dekker (1602) lends condsiderable support to this possible origin of the phrase. "Now," says one character to another, "are thou in thy pee and cue" and the context makes it plain that pee here means a pea jacket and cue means a queue. But the passage is probably a joking allusion to an already established expression, for in another play, only ten years later, a character orders a quart of wine and insists that "it be a Pee and Kew."
Some say it’s an admonition to a typesetter not to confuse the two closely-similar letters p adn q.
Some say it’s a warning from a schoolteacher to his students to make the proper distinction in their writing between the p‘s and the q‘s—which are alike except for the direction of the vertical loop. And whether this was the original meaning or not, it is what has been presumed to be the the meaning by most people for the past 200 years.
Dunno if anyone’s still paying attention to the older threads but thought I’d add my ‘haypenny’ worth.
A friend (who fancies himself as a bit of a linguist) recently informed me that the reason for this term came from the fact that there were two types of Celts, ‘P’ Celts and ‘Q’ Celts (one was for Irish/Scottish Celts and the others for Welsh/Breton - though I can’t remember which was which).
The advice to ‘mind your Ps and Qs’ was given to early diplomats (whether Roman, Christian or whatever - your guess is as good as mine). I.e. to keep in mind which particular type of barbarian you were dealing with otherwise you could find yourself in a very sticky situation.
For a saying like this to get established, it has to strike a bit of a chord with your average speaker of the language. I find it hard to imagine that this useful but seemingly arbitrary distinction between the Gaelic and Brythonic groups of languages would have made people sit up and think, "Hey that’s good - I’ll have to remember that one!" (I say "arbitrary" because none of the Q-Celtic languages appears to use the letter Q.)
Even if the idea had caught on, would those letters have been pronounced pee and cue at the time?
On the other hand, I can imagine people being mildly amused by the pun of p’ease and ‘kyous sounding like the letters, so that would get my vote too.
p’ease and ‘kyous sounding like the letters, so that would get my vote too
And mine. All the other explanations sound like post-constructions to me. People have always loved to play with language. It seems perfectly natural that "p’s and q’s" would evolve in this manner.
There’s another, probably incorrect, explanation that I’ve heard. In the days of lead type, typesetters could easily mistake a "p" for a "q" when picking out a lead character. And so forth.
Of course, if any ancient typographers, dance masters, publicans, sailors or Soprano singers would like to contradict the most simple explanation, I’d be happy to bow to their expertise.
There’s another, probably incorrect, explanation that I’ve heard. In the days of lead type, typesetters could easily mistake a "p" for a "q" when picking out a lead character
I think it actually is from typesetting - the type must be set in mirror image so it it very easy to mistakenly set one for the other when working quickly.
