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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]
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").
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
Unfortunately, this is not the source of Mind your Ps and Qs, firstly for the obvious reason that almost nobody was fluent in English, one of the p-Celtic, and one of the q-Celtic languages. Secondly the choice of q to represent the c of mac was a modern choice to avoid confusion with the soft c sound (as in cereal ).
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The term grammar can also describe the linguistic behaviour of groups of speakers and writers rather than individuals. Differences in scale are important to this meaning: for example, English grammar could describe those rules followed by every one of the language's speakers. [2]
The 2024 Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is set to arrive in New York City from West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and the family donating it shares the story behind their special connection to ...
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