Mind your pints and quarts. Bartenders would say this to the people in the bar. It means for them to be on good behavior in the bar and not to cause trouble.
Posts: 5280 | Location: The Motor City | Registered: 06-03-02
I don't know which story is true, if any. I have heard what Clare posted, but I have also heard that the expression started in printing shops, in which apprentices were told to "mind your p's and q's" since those two letters (in lower case) were difficult to tell apart when using the printing blocks, which have the letters carved backwards on them. Both stories make sense, which, of course, has no bearing on which one, if either, is accurate.
Posts: 16773 | Location: Lincoln Place, Granite City, IL, USA | Registered: 06-03-02
Pints and quarts? This story usually comes as one of bookkeeping: the publican would need to be careful in noting sales of pints and quarts. That version makes no sense. Nobody would record beer sales by the pint or quart (a quart is two pints). They would record the barrels. The version given above, that a 'bartender' would tell people to mind their pints and quarts; meaning to mind their behaviour; doesn't ring true at all to this old drinker . First of all beer was almost never sold in quarts, so there would not be quart glasses or tankards there. Second it is not the way a publican would quell rowdy behaviour.Imagine him saying, even figuratively, to a pub full of rowdy drunks ' Do please quieten down lest you spill your drinks'. It might work at tea at the Ritz, if a vicar was whispering too loudly, but in a pub? No
The likeliest explanation seems to be that of typesetting. The letter Q in lower case, q, looks like P in lower case, p , when on the lead type itself, being the mirror image of the printed letter, and vice versa. An apprentice typesetter with the case of letters could easily mistake one for the other,as indeed could the senior compositor himself if tired or rushed. So 'mind your ps and qs' means 'take great care in how you act'.
"Mind your pints and quarts" really sounds unlikely (wouldn't "mind your beer" have been pithier?), and why would a typesetters' in-joke catch on?
"P's and q's" rhymes in a cute way with "please's and thank-you's". As the phrase almost always seems to be associated with what your mom told you to do when you went visiting, this seems both the simplest and likeliest explanation.
I first heard the expression when learning to read and write script. As most English speakers are taught, the two letter, in script form, are highly similar, only the direction of the bend at the bottom of the descending stroke differs, and, writing fast, makes the substitution an easy mistake to make.
Alan Moore
Posts: 2012 | Location: USA | Registered: 10-05-03
There's a nice article on this topic at World Wide Words by Michael Quinion. He offers this list of candidate explanations:
quote:
-Advice to a child learning its letters to be careful not to mix up the handwritten lower-case letters p and q.
- Similar advice to a printer’s apprentice, for whom the backward-facing metal type letters would be especially confusing.
- Jocular, or perhaps deadly serious, advice to a barman not to confuse the letters p and q on the tally slate, on which the letters stood for the pints and quarts consumed “on tick” by the patrons.
- An abbreviation of mind your please’s and thank-you’s.
- Instructions from a French dancing master to be sure to perform the dance figures pieds and queues accurately.
- An admonishment to seamen not to soil their navy pea-jackets with their tarred queues, that is, their pigtails.
It is possible to put forward objections to all of these...
Quinion concludes:
quote:
If I had to make a choice, I’d plump for the alphabet-learning origin. What we do know is that mind your Ps and Qs was first recorded in 1779 but that it is slowly dying out...In common with so many words and phrases in English, its origins must remain a mystery.
...and I just hate when that happens.
Posts: 1917 | Location: U.S. | Registered: 06-03-02
The alphabet one doesn't ring true. As Quinion points out, why not 'b's and 'd's? They actually are the mirror image of each other; 'q' has a tail in handwriting (and most older fonts?). Why not 'a's and 'e's? 'S's and 'z's?
There's also this; "This name was written either as Mananteana or Mananqueana (in eighteenth-century handwriting it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the small letters t and q in Indian names)."www.tsha.utexas.edu Handwriting was different then. The alphabet idea strikes me as typical of an explanation of an idiom thought up later.
I notice that Quinion can't think of a specific objection to the 'please and thank you' origin - although I guess it doesn't fit the nineteenth century meaning so exactly.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: newnickname,
. First of all beer was almost never sold in quarts, so there would not be quart glasses or tankards there. Second it is not the way a publican would quell rowdy behaviour.Imagine him saying, even figuratively, to a pub full of rowdy drunks ' Do please quieten down lest you spill your drinks'. It might work at tea at the Ritz, if a vicar was whispering too loudly, but in a pub? No 
