Minor correction: Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel peace prize by Norwegians, not Swedes.

Troy said:

Hi Grant and Martha:

This is my first post, but I'm a regular podcast listener.

I always assumed the P's and Q's came from the field of Economics, where P and Q are used as labels for Price and Quantity on those infamous supply and demand charts. I gathered from this that "Mind your P's and Q's" meant pay attention to your business.

Do the timelines match up with this possible origin?

Troy

Grant and Martha,

I enjoy your podcast regularly, and, like Troy, post for the first time. Let me speculate further and take my Q from the theatre shorthand – just speculating, of course: now, as an actor in a theatre company, you have to mind your POSITIONS and your CUES. An obvious shorthand expression results from (let's say) a marginal note: cue > Q and position > P, and so, in alphabetical order, "mind your ps and qs". I can easily imagine a Marlowe or a Shakespeare jot this down to a forgetful actor's sides… The advantage of this approach is not taking this idiom, well, too literally.

Yes, Betty Draper is from Philadelphia. She attended Lower Merion High School which is located on Philadelphia’s Main Line (Ardmore, to be precise). She has a BA in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr, so a double Mainliner. I would take issue with the description of the Main Line as a neighborhood. I think it's better described as suburbs of Philadelphia, rather than a neighborhood (for me, a neighborhood would be within the city of Philadelphia).

Grant, you said that caser referred to a crown coin. Might it be derived from caesar? My Latin is nearly non-existent, but I believe that the classical pronunciation is very close to kaiser, so from caesar to caser would not be a big leap, and the crown makes sense. I understand that obviously logical transitions are not exactly de rigeur in word derivations, but it's worth a try.

Thanks,
Peter

Glenn said:

You make a good point about counting. Still, I think any consecutive ten years can correctly be called a decade. In this case, a lot of people elect to use the "odometer" method of conceptualizing decades. Don't you just love to see those numbers roll up? Besides, it makes it a lot easier to talk about a decade as, for example, the 90s, eliminating the need for some messy periphrase.

Sure, the same applies to the miles my truck has travelled, but who takes a picture of the dashboard when the odometer rolls up to 100,001? My advice: don't invite that person to your next party.

I felt the same way as you did, until, on the advice of Dr. Bart Ehrman, I read the book "Questioning the Millennium", by Stephen J. Gould, wherein he explains the origin of our counting the years. As he describes it, our current system of numbering the years has been so determined and re-determined, and through so many erroneous ways, that the current system of numbering the years is completely arbitrary, fraught with errors, and, according to Dr. Gould's explanation, so inaccurate as to make any worrying over one or two years superfluous. Since reading this book, I have ceased to fight about this topic, and no longer worry about it.

Grant Barrett said:
Jump-in, "P's and Q's" were used before either one of those men were born, dating to the very early 1600s, which, I believe, is also earlier than when today's notation for logic became standard.

The first published discussion of symbolic logic was George Boole's An Investigation of the Laws of Thought on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities, which was published in 1854.

rk said:

Paddywhack. Not sure how this helps to link the word with "hand", but I thought of that kids' song with the lines, "knick knack paddy whack / give a dog a bone." Wikipedia has an article: . I have no idea, though, what this means.

Martha and Grant, I love the show. I've been a long time listener!

I agree – I would have looked at the song as at least perpetuating the term 'paddywhack' and suspect the song is the reason that the term is used mostly in reference to children's hands, if it did indeed as Grant says originally refer to grown up hands. I'll bet there are a lot more people familiar with "This Old Man" than with a term used quite a few decades back to refer to brawling Irishmen…