G's and P's and Q's oh my!

I was corresponding on one of the online sites the other day and the guy seemed nice enough but when I asked what he was interested in, he typed huntin and fishin.  Now, I don’t know about you but its pretty important to me that if a word has a g on the end that it stays there.   Just something about saying them without the g’s that sounds so hillbilly or country.  Now, in all fairness, there are probably some pretty intelligent people out there that leave off their g’s on a regular basis.  I just think that you sound a lot smarter if you leave them on.  Doesn’t mean you are.

My friend Brad was laughing when I told him the story of the guy who I was interested in until he started leaving off his g’s. He wondered if I felt so passionately about the other letters.  He wondered if they put the apostrophe in the place of the missing “g” if that elevated them to a higher level in my mind.  I suppose maybe it does. 

Words are just important to me.  I think it’s because I write and read so much.  Nothing drives me crazier than the misuse of words.  There is a guy at work that says I done 6 visits or I done 4 phone calls.  I have to suppress the urge every time he says that to correct him. 

Not saying I’m perfect. Far from it.  I think one of my earlier blogs mentioned how furious it made my ex-husband because I said bur gu lar instead of burglar.  I didn’t even know I was saying it wrong until it finally got on his last nerve one day and he exploded.  I’m sure there are other words I regularly mispronounce.  But I never leave off my g’s.  I am guilty of a lot of run on sentences, both spoken and written.  And I regularly get the message “fragment, consider revising” when I do my spelling and grammar check.

I wondered  while thinking about the missing g’s what the phrase minding your p’s and q’s meant.  So I googled it.  I google everything!  It amazes me that I can type in a question no matter how weird and the answer pops up.  For example, the other day when the pickle smell was coming from my air conditioner vent , I googled “smell of pickle coming from air conditioner vent” and lo and behold it pulled up an article that suggested it might be the filter.  I was truly impressed.  Doesn’t take much to excite me obviously.

There were several theories on the phrase minding your p’s and q’s but really only one of them makes sense to me when I think about how the term is used.  I’ve always thought that it meant paying attention to details.  Which fits with the theory that it came from the old days when printing presses were in use and the p and q being so close together and a mirror image of each other made it easy for them to be mixed up.  Thus you paid attention to them so they didn’t get switched.

Another theory was that it was some sort of code for parents to their children that meant say please and thank you. Basically, to mind their manners.  The P referred to saying Please and the Q referred to saying Thank you.  Which when you say it does sound like it has a Q in it. 

The final theory says the term originated in English Pubs when the bartender would run  a tab for a patron and place a p when the patron had a pint and a q when the patron had a quart.  So the term then meant to keep track of how much you were drinking so that your behavior didn’t get out of hand.

Going back to the “g” dropping man on the dating site.  Once I got past the g-less hobbies, and started conversing with him on other subjects, he turned out to be very interesting and obviously very smart. I don’t think you get to be a chemical engineer without going to college.  And just to be a smart a__ when he asked what I liked to do I said I liked performin comedy and writin my blog.  And as soon as I finish eatin supper I am going to go walkin before it gets too dark..  Just sayin.