I will show this to hubby who was the original questionner, he made me think about it.

> or everyone has to watch their

> For many, especially on the Crossfire Board,
> I would plant my tongue in my cheek and
> mutter that it means APPEASE and ACCUSE.

> But here's the standard meaning:

> MIND YOUR PS AND QS
> A puzzling and quirky idiom

> There has recently been a discussion on the
> Usenet newsgroup alt.usage.english about
> this somewhat outdated saying. As so often
> happens, a series of posters have recounted
> the explanations they've heard about its
> origins without really advancing the
> discussion. It would be difficult to reach a
> conclusion in any case, as the facts to base
> it on have been lost. All we can do is
> theorise, which can be fun, but it does tend
> to generate more heat than light. Here, for
> what its worth, are the facts so far as I
> know them.
> Its meaning in recent times - and the one I
> learned as a child in west London nearly 50
> years ago - has been "to mind one's
> manners", "to behave
> properly". This is a weakened sense to
> the one it had in the nineteenth century,
> when it meant, according to Eric Partridge
> in A Dictionary of Historical Slang:
> "to be careful, exact, or prudent in
> behaviour".

> These are some of the explanations I've seen
> advanced in various places:

> 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. Why should p and q be singled
> out for attention in handwriting, when
> similar problems occur with b and d? This
> comment might be thought to apply with even
> greater force to the poor printer's
> apprentice. The pints and quarts explanation
> sounds reasonable, provided that men in bars
> used to drink beer by the quart, as in fact
> they did. The French dancing-master
> explanation sounds just too far-fetched to
> be credible, as does the one about the
> seamen. The mind your please's and
> thank-you's seems just as unlikely as the
> others, but is seriously advanced by some
> dictionaries, the current edition of the
> Collins English Dictionary among them.
> There are two similar usages recorded:

> There was once an expression P and Q, often
> written pee and kew, which was a
> seventeenth-century colloquial expression
> for "prime quality". This later
> became a dialect expression (the English
> Dialect Dictionary reports it in Victorian
> times from Shropshire and Herefordshire).
> OED2 has a citation from Rowlands' Knave of
> Harts of 1612:
> "Bring in a quart of Maligo, right
> true: And looke, you Rogue, that it be Pee
> and Kew."
> Nobody is really sure what either P or Q
> stood for. To say they're the initials of
> "Prime Quality" seems to be folk
> etymology, because surely that would make
> "PQ" rather than "P and
> Q".

> Partridge says that the phrase learn your Ps
> and Qs, was common about 1820, again being
> advice to children who may be confused about
> the two letters.
> You may feel the first of these tends to
> confuse the issue rather than illuminate it,
> and you may be right. It may just be
> coincidence. However, the second does tend
> to support the idea that it relates to
> children learning their alphabets. 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. To lose it would be a
> pity, as it is a link to the past and makes
> a good subject for some quiet speculation
> and ingenious attempts at explanation. In
> common with so many words and phrases in
> English, its origins must remain a mystery.