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Pupils also had to mind the order of letters in the alphabet (p comes before q). As noted by W. D. Henkle in Educational Notes and Queries in 1876, in this sense the phrase should be "note your p ' s and q ' s" (lowercase), because the distinction of majuscule P and Q does not pose a problem. [4]
"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".
As seen in the photo of the composing stick, a lower case 'q' looks like a 'd', a lower case 'b' looks like a 'p', a lower case 'p' looks like a 'b' and a lower case 'd' looks like a 'q'. This is reputed to be the origin of the expression "mind your p's and q's". It might just as easily have been "mind your b's and d's". [3]
The plural of individual letters is usually written with -'s: [22] there are two h's in this sentence; mind your p's and q's; dot the i's and cross the t's. Some people extend this use of the apostrophe to other cases, such as plurals of numbers written in figures (e.g. "1990's"), words used as terms (e.g. "his writing uses a lot of but's").
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America Online CEO Stephen M. Case, left, and Time Warner CEO Gerald M. Levin listen to senators' opening statements during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the merger of the two ...
1973: The logic of politeness; or, minding your P's and Q's. In: Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, ed. C. Corum, T. Cedric Smith-Stark, A. Weiser, pp 292–305. Chicago: Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago; 1975: Language and Woman's Place. ISBN 0-19-516757-0
From January 2008 to December 2012, if you bought shares in companies when Edith E. Holiday joined the board, and sold them when she left, you would have a -47.1 percent return on your investment, compared to a -2.8 percent return from the S&P 500.