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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 ...
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]
In Czech, the mnemonic device to remember letters in Morse code lies in remembering words or short phrases that begin with each appropriate letter and have a long vowel (i.e. á é í ó ú ý) for every dash and a short vowel (a e i o u y) for every dot. Additionally, some other sets of words with a particular theme have been thought up in ...
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").
The following is an alphabetical list of Greek and Latin roots, stems, and prefixes commonly used in the English language from P to Z. See also the lists from A to G and from H to O . Some of those used in medicine and medical technology are not listed here but instead in the entry for List of medical roots, suffixes and prefixes .
In the vowels chart, a separate phonetic value is given for each major dialect, alongside the words used to name their corresponding lexical sets. The diaphonemes for the lexical sets given here are based on RP and General American; they are not sufficient to express all of the distinctions found in other dialects, such as Australian English.
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 ).
The English pronouns form a relatively small category of words in Modern English whose primary semantic function is that of a pro-form for a noun phrase. [1] Traditional grammars consider them to be a distinct part of speech, while most modern grammars see them as a subcategory of noun , contrasting with common and proper nouns .