What is the origin of the phrase Mind your p's and q's?
1. The letters p and q, with the lowercase letters being a mirror image of each others, were often confused by children learning to write (and also by typesetters).
2. Mind your pints and quarts, as used by bartenders when serving.
3. Mind your please's (P's) and thank you's (the last syllable sounds like Q).
Interesting etymology tidbit: The word peas came from the Latin word pisum, and was adopted into English as pease. Since most nouns take an -s ending for their plural, the s sound was dropped and thus pea became the singular. This is an example of a back-formation.
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