Talk:Mind your Ps and Qs

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Only One Clear Origin

"mind your Ps and Qs" meaning "mind your manners" is quite obviously from "mind your pleases and thank-yous". It is parental baby talk, mimicking the child's simplification of consonant groups in "please" and simply contracting in "thank-you", which latter the plays of Bernard Shaw for example render simply as "Kew". It is to Wikipedia's credit that it gives the true explanation first, although it does give excessive space and credit to the various silly folk-etymologies. The earliest citations will probably found in children's books. 110.143.186.35 (talk) 04:34, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

From the article, it is clear it is not "obvious" and to assume your theory is correct borders on the arrogant. When this is added to your suggestion that other ideas are "various silly folk-etymologies" you are no longer on the borders of arrogant but a couple of days hard ride into being just plain rude. It's worth noting that the expression appeared in print, referring to Pint and Quarts over 120 years before GBS was born MrMarmite (talk) 13:27, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

You got it all wrong it goes like this "tittles tills en's and em's mind your P's and Q's. Cross your t's and dot your I's watch your spacing as you please." it refers to printing and putting letters in the right box of the lower case while en's and em's are the spacing between letters and words. a p look like a q since it is backward BTW upper case and lower case are the 2 cases of type used for printing https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/761/whats-the-origin-of-the-expression-mind-your-ps-and-qs/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.23.181.134 (talk) 01:18, 13 April 2018 (UTC)

Thank you all! I love wikipedia, and all these multiple origin stories are why we still say MIND YOUR Ps and Qs -- a good practice on WP itself :-) 192.80.96.39 (talk) 15:25, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

Merger proposal

Why not to joint this article with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ps_and_Qs —Preceding unsigned comment added by 127.0.0.1 (talk) 14:10, 13 February, 2008 (UTC)

I agree. Cenarium (talk) 18:25, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

I've redirected Ps and Qs here; the article was unreferenced, apart from one blog site, so I have not merged content. Pretty much all was covered here anyway. Note that there is some discussion at Talk:Ps and Qs about theories, but the refernces mentioned there don't seem reliable either. Gwinva (talk) 20:58, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Title needs to be changed

The title needs to be changed. Wikipedia's style for article titles is sentence case, so neither p nor q should be capitalized. This title would properly be styled as follows, according to CMOS 7.59 (16th edition): Mind your p's and q's

The title needs to be changed to 'Mind your Ps and Qs.'. RdCrestdBreegull (talk) 21:43, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

totally agree. It looks illiterate at the moment MrMarmite (talk) 22:20, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Done. Incidentally if you're wondering how this is done, you need to click on the 'move' tab at the top of screen. Jefferson61345 (talk) 10:27, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Logic origins?

i thought that the expression meant logic.. i.e. in the phrase "somebody doesn't know their Ps and Qs". In some logic branch of mathematics, and apparently philosophy, two things are often compared with p's and q's. i.e. p=the car is red, q=the car is blue; if p then not q. i'm relatively sure that i've heard the expression "looks like someone didn't study their ps and qs in school" before. if i can find any info on this (sources), then i'll check back here. various wiki pages with what i'm talking about:

• Logical implication
• Contraposition
• Transposition (logic)
• Symbolic logic
• Modal logic
• Conversion (logic)

although Im not positive, it appears these concepts fall under "term logic". Nnnudibranch 08:07, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree, & was about to say roughly the same thing. Formal logic seems to me to be one of the more likely origins of the expression. Leitermann (talk) 21:08, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

Being an Honors Geometry student, I recently came out of conditionals, converses, biconditionals, and contrapositives, so I can understand where this is coming from. I don't really think that it's the actual origin of the saying, but it could easily be used by a teacher in modern times. Venku Tur'Mukan (talk) 15:58, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

curious observation

"Cornish is from the 'P' Celtic family. The P and the Q is used to differentiate between British (Brythonic) and Gaelic because of words like 'Penn' in Cornish would become 'Ceann' in Gaelic. A placename example would be Kintyre in Scotland being essentially the same name as Pentire in Cornwall. The other name for the 'P' Celtic languages is British or Brythonic. "

(from: http://www.cornish-language.org/english/faq.asp) 141.243.112.20 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 04:27, 25 May 2009 (UTC).