Answers: Various possibilities:
- Mind your pints and quarts. This is suggested as deriving from the practise of chalking up a tally of drinks contained by English pubs (on the slate). Publicans had to variety sure to mark up the quart drinks as distinct from the pint drinks. This explanation is widely repeated but there's little to support it, apart from the reality that pint and quart begin near p and q.
- Advice to printer’s apprentices to avoid confusing the backward-facing metal type lowercase Ps and Qs. I've never heard any suggestion that printer should mind their ds and bs though, even though that have the benefit of rhyming, which would have made it a more attractive slogan.
- Mind your pea (jacket) and queue (wig). Pea jacket were short, rough woollen overcoats, commonly worn by sailors within the 18th century. Perruques were full wig worn by fashionable gentlemen. It is difficult to visualize the need for an expression to tip off people to avoid confusing them.
- Mind your pieds (feet) and queue (wigs). This is suggested to have be an instruction given by French dancing masters to their charges. This have the benefit of placing the perruque in the right context - so long as we adopt the phrase as being originally French. There's no basis to suppose it is from France and no version of the phrase exists within French.
- It is advice to children study to write to take caution not to mix up the lower-case letters p and q. Again, the 'd' and 'b' counter argument applies.
- It derived as reminder to children to be polite. This is supposed to be as a form of 'mind your pleases and thank-yous' - 'mind you pleases and kyous'. Pretty far-fetched that one.
- P and q stands for "prime aspect." There is, or rather be as this now seem to have also be withdrawn, a 1612 citation which links PQ with 'prime quality'. If that's the start why isn't the phrase mind your PQ?
i know it means pints and quarts re: alcohol consumption.
im thinking it be originated contained by england. that part i can't be sure of though.
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