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Movable type p's and q's could be easily mistaken, especially as they are mirror-reversed from the printed result. According to Michael Quinion, "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 ...
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 ).
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]
[64] [65] [66] Many guides recommend apostrophes whether the single letters are lowercase (as in "minding your p's and q's") or uppercase (as in "A's and S's"). [67] The Chicago Manual of Style recommends the apostrophe of plurality only for lowercase letters. [68] Sometimes, adding just s rather than 's may leave meaning ambiguous or ...
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
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The HuffPost/Chronicle analysis found that subsidization rates tend to be highest at colleges where ticket sales and other revenue is the lowest — meaning that students who have the least interest in their college’s sports teams are often required to pay the most to support them.
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").