Anyone who “minds their p’s and q’s” is known for acting on their best behavior, but what do those two letters stand for? Polite and quiet? Proper and quaint? Peas and uh… qarrots? We won’t take liberties with the spelling of “carrots,” and we can further confirm that none of those options is correct. However, there are a few origin stories for this perfectly quirky turn of phrase.
The Oxford English Dictionary records examples of these letters in print as early as 1602, though “p’s and q’s” were sometimes written as “Pee and Kue.” “To be on one’s p’s and q’s” and variants of that phrase meant to be on one’s best behavior. The exact wording of “mind your p’s and q’s” was first documented in the 1756 book The Life & Memoirs of Ephraim Tristram Bates.
While lexicographers and dictionaries can trace the printed citations and usages of words and phrases, they often don’t reveal how these phrases originally came to be. With “p’s and q’s,” there are several possible origin stories, but none rises above the rest. It’s possibly related to the similarity of the appearance of “p” and “q” in penmanship and a warning to avoid mixing them up; a similar story is related to printers mixing up the letters when typesetting. A completely different theory is based on the idea that bartenders used to keep running tabs of the number of pints and quarts drunk by their patrons (or told the patrons to “mind their own p’s and q’s”). A fourth and final purported origin story is that “p’s and q’s” translates to “pleases and thank-yous,” as the latter part of “thank-you” sounds like the letter “Q.”
While all of these theories relate in some way to the idea of good and orderly behavior, each is dubious in its own way. We may never know the true origin of this early 17th-century phrase, so feel free to come up with a fun origin story of your own for “p’s and q’s.”
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