11 January 2022
To mind one’s p’s and q’s is to be on one’s best behavior, to mind one’s manners. The phrase appears in the mid eighteenth century. The origin is not known for certain, but the most plausible explanation is that it comes from teaching reading and writing, in that children often have difficulty distinguishing the lowercase <p> from <q>. While there is evidence to support this explanation, it is by no means certain that learning to read is the metaphor underlying the origin.
But before I get to the eighteenth century uses, there are some seventeenth century uses of p and q that might be precursors to the phrase we know today. A couple of these are false leads, but a couple could possibly be related.
The two false leads appear in plays by Thomas Dekker. The first is in his 1602 Satiro-mastix. In this exchange between a character and his servant, pee and kue refer to a coat. The pee is a reference to pea-cloth, a coarse woolen fabric. This use of pee dates to the early fifteenth century—today pea-cloth and pea-jackets are associated with sailors, but this association did not exist in the seventeenth century. The kue is a reference to the coat’s tails. Horace’s pee and kue is a woolen coat with tails:
Asi[nius]. If you flye out Ningle, heer's your Cloake; I thinke it raine too.
Ho[race]. Hide my shoulders in't.
Asi. Troth so th'adst neede, for now thou art in thy Pee and Kue; thou hast such a villanous broad backe, that I warrant th'art able to beare away any mans iestes in England.
The second is in West-Ward Hoe, a 1607 play Dekker wrote in collaboration with John Webster. In the play, the character Justiniano poses as a writing instructor for three women in order to arrange meetings between the women and their lovers without their husbands suspecting. In the scene in question, the husband of one the women, named Honeysuckle, has asked Justiniano how his wife is progressing:
Iusti[niano]. Sir so long as your mirth bee voyde of all Squirrility, tis not vnfit for your calling: I trust ere few daies bee at an end to haue her fal to her ioyning: for she has her letters ad vnguem: her A. her great B. and her great C. very right D. and E. dilicate: hir double F. of a good length, but that it straddels a little to wyde: at the G. very cunning.
Hony[suckle]. Her H. is full like mine: a goodly big H.
Iusti. But her: double LL is wel: her O. of a reasonable Size: at her p. and q. neither Marchantes Daughter, Aldermans Wife, young countrey Gentlewoman, nor Courtiers Mistris, can match her.
While the use of the alphabet here is filled with sexual innuendo, the letters p and q have no special significance. They are just letters. And the fact that this particular edition does not capitalize them like the other letters has no significance. That’s just the printer’s choice. This is a play, and how the words are spelled has no bearing on the performance or the audience’s reception.
A more mysterious appearance of P and Q is in a 1645 letter from Stephen Goffe to Henry Jermyn. Both men were active in the restoration of the monarchy during and after the English Civil War. Goffe writes:
If it be possible to provide money, it will prove an excellent Design, for the whole execution is to be disposed of by the King as absolutely as if they were English ships, and the Commanders English, the intention being not for P. and Q. but for honour and the service of the King,
What P and Q means here and how it might relate to the later phrase, if at all, is unknown. (At least to me. If anyone more knowledgeable about the period knows, please clue me in.)
Another mysterious, but more promising use is in Samuel Rowland’s 1612 poem “A Drunken Knave.” Here we still don’t know what pee and kew literally signify. The phrase pee and kew could refer to high quality or it could refer to speed:
Boy y’ are a villaine, didst thou fill this Sacke?
Tis flat you Rascall, thou hast plaid the Iacke,
Bring in a quart of Maligo, right true:
And looke, you Rogue, that it be Pee and Kew.
Some good Tobacco, quickly, and a light:
Sirrha: this same was mingled yesternight.
What Pipes are these? now take them broken vp,
Another Bowle, I doe not like this cup.
How these two seventeenth century passages relate to the present-day phrase, if they do at all, is just not known. My guess is that there is no connection.
It isn’t until the mid eighteenth century that we get the phrase mind your p’s and q’s itself. The meaning of the phrase is clear from the start, even if what the letters signify is not. It first appears in print in the 1756 Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates. In it, Bates is dispensing advice on how one should travel:
Mind your P’s and your Q’s, and always travel in the Autumn.—Away for Gloucester.—Brother Firelock.—Huzza, I wish I am not robb’d tho’!
(In his otherwise excellent Wordhistories.net, Pascal Tréguer attributes this line to a coachman who has just been tipped by Bates, but this is a misreading of how quotation marks were used in the eighteenth century. The line is spoken by Bates.)
Another appearance, several decades later, is in Thomas Francklin’s 1776 play The Contract. In a comic scene the characters of Colonel Lovemore and Eleanor Briggs, assisted by their two servants, feign courtship while actually detesting one another. Upon the two women’s approach, the Colonel’s servant, Martin, tells Lovemore to mind your p’s and q’s, to pay attention to the manners and customs, in this case of courtship. A bit later, Eleanor’s servant, Betty, tells her mistress to mind your cue. This latter use operates on several levels of meaning. It is an admonition to pay attention to the customs of courtship, and it could also be a dramatic cue, telling her mistress that it is time to say something they had planned. It is also sexual innuendo, cue standing in for quaint, an archaic, but still familiar to an eighteenth-century audience, euphemism for the female pudendum. Again, as this is a play to performed, the spelling is not significant:
Martin. Hush——Hush——methinks I hear the rustling of silks, mind your p’s and q’s, Sir, don’t forget your sighs and raptures now for heaven’s sake.
Colonel. Here she comes, egad.
Martin. (Peeping.) There the old fright is, sure enough: now, Sir, keep it up.
Colonel. O never fear me.
Enter Miss ELEANOR and BETTY.
Colonel. (Meeting Eleanor.) She comes, She comes the charmer of my heart—O, Eleanora! (They embrace.
Eleanor. My dearest Colonel, it is then given me once more to behold——O support me, or I die——he’s a horrid creature! (Aside to Betty.
Colonel. After so many years of tedious absence, again to look on those dear eyes, to taste these balmy lips. (Embrace again.) She stinks like a pole-cat. (Aside to Martin.
Eleanor. (Pushing him from her.) Fie, Colonel, I cannot bear it—Oh! it is too much!
Betty. (Aside.) It is indeed.
Colonel. (Turning to Martin.) O, Martin, this is insupportable!——
Martin. (Aside.) Very well, Sir, extremely well, keep it up.
Betty. (Aside.) Now, madam, mind your cue.
Eleanor. Colonel, I vow and protest I blush at my own behaviour, but excess of joy, betray’d me into a weakness unbecoming the delicacy of my sex.
(The closing parentheses in the stage directions that end a line are omitted in the 1776 printing, another eighteenth-century printing practice.)
The best evidence for an origin in reading and writing the letters <p> and <q> is in a couple of appearances in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. (Dekker and Webster’s use in West-Ward Hoe is not good evidence as it doesn’t call out those two letters specifically, but rather proceeds through the alphabet.) The first bit of evidence is from Charles Churchill’s 1763 poem The Ghost, in which he critiques Thomas Sheridan, an actor, educator, and proponent of “proper” speaking and writing. Sheridan was also the father to the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan:
He knows alone in proper mode
How to take vengeance on an Ode
And how to butcher AMMON’s Son,
And poor Jack Dryden both in one.
On all occasions next the Chair
He stands for service of the MAYOR,
And to instruct him how to use
His A’s, and B’s, and P’s, and Q’s.
While not the first use of Ps and Qs, it is quite early.
A somewhat later use in reference to writing is from the United States by British-born, pro-Federalist critic John Williams, writing under the pseudonym of Anthony Pasquin, in his c.1804 Hamiltoniad, in which he takes President Thomas Jefferson to task:
Would I were metamorphos’d to a Flea,
I’d hop to Washington, with cruel glee,
Steal in the galligaskins of our Chief,
And make his Excellency twist with grief;
Watch, when he wrote of Diplomatic news;
And make him careless of his P’s and Q’s.
(Galligaskin is a jocular term for hose or breeches.)
These appearances are by no means iron-clad evidence that mind your p’s and q’s comes from teaching people to read and write, but they provide better evidence than any other explanation has.
Other explanations, none of which have any real evidence to support them are:
From printers having difficulty distinguishing the lowercase letters <p> and <q>. While this is similar to the reading and writing explanation, there are no known uses of the phrase in the context of printing.
From tavern keepers tallying the pints and quarts consumed by customers. Again, no early uses are in this context.
From a sailor’s pea coat and pigtail, or queue. While we do have Dekker’s play that makes reference to a pea coat, none of the early uses are nautical in context.
It stands for prime quality. While this explanation might account for Rowlands’s 1612 use, it still doesn’t account for the use of the conjunction and in that appearance: mind your primes and qualities makes little sense.
It stands for pleases and thank yous. But that phrase doesn’t appear until the twentieth century, so this explanation is clearly a post-hoc rationalization.
It refers to pied and queue, terms from French referring to dance steps, but there are no instances of mind your pieds and queues or anything similar, nor are any of the early attestations in the context of dance.
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