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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 ...
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").
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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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]
Mind Your Language is a British sitcom that premiered on ITV in 1977. It was produced by London Weekend Television and directed by Stuart Allen. Three series were made by London Weekend Television between 1977 and 1979, and it was briefly revived in 1985 (or 1986 in most ITV regions) with six of the original cast members.
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Learn a language, and you will avoid a war (Arab proverb) [5] Least said, soonest mended; Less is more; Let bygones be bygones; Let not the sun go down on your wrath; Let sleeping Aussies lie; Let sleeping dogs lie; Let the buyer beware; Let the cat out of the bag [14] Let the dead bury the dead (N.T.) Let the punishment fit the crime