No one seems to know exactly where the idiom “mind your Ps and Qs” originated, but I’d like to believe that it came from advice to typesetters. In letterpress printing, words are composed metal type letter by metal type letter, left-to-right, with each letter inserted upside down. For beginning typesetters, backward-facing letters are confusing, especially the mirrored lower-case letter pairs p and q, and b and d. And thus the advice to be alert and watch the details (“mind the ps and qs”).
In addition to the typesetting theory, there are many competing explanations — my favorite: an admonishment from a French dancing master to perform the dance figures pieds and queues correctly. Others include a variation on the typesetter advice, but to small children learning to write the alphabet, not to mix up p and q.
This article gives some more possible origins and then clears up the mystery: “Investigations by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2007 when revising the entry turned up early examples of the use of Ps and Qs to mean learning the alphabet. The first is in a poem by Charles Churchill, published in 1763: ‘On all occasions next the chair / He stands for service of the Mayor, / And to instruct him how to use / His A’s and B’s, and P’s and Q’s.’ The conclusion must be that this is the true origin.”
In my current project to feature my large wood type in my printing, my newest broadside uses only Ps and Qs. That’s it above.
