Mind Your B's and D's...

So I got this email from a friend and it has all these outlandish origins for words and phrases, none of which are probably accurate, but they're funn nonetheless.

When I got to "Mind your p's and q's" though, it was an explanation I had never heard before: it's from English pubs and means "Mind your pints and quarts." Huh? I don't get it...

I had always heard that it was from early printers who would be looking at the letters backwards and would easily mix up the lower case p and q. So, this is discredited all over the internet by the following logic:

lower case b and d look alike, too. So, neener, neener to the printer arguement.

Okay, I can accept that. So I pulled up a page from the Gutenberg Bible (you know, an EARLY PRINTING PRESS PROJECT) and sure enough, lower case p and q look strikingly similar. Lower case b and d...um, not so much. The d and o look more alike that the b and the d. Now, did ALL printers use d's that look like o's? I don't know. This is a blog, don't expect scholarly research here (I spent a whopping 26 seconds searching for that Gutenberg image - I'm exhausted...) but in at least one example (only the most famous printing press example in the world) the origin that I believed to be accurate has been vindicated.

So what?

Well, it doesn't really mean anything. But we're a contentious lot, aren't we? You say the sky is blue, I'll say, well, more like blue-grey.

Okay, the point is that we say things that we don't even know what they mean or where they come from. In my days at Pitt Bradford, I remember Paul Pival saying that a freshman in college wrote an essay in which she said, "It's a doggie dog world..." Huh? What does that even mean?

I think we do that in the church sometimes. We know the lingo - we use it - but what it really means? Well, not as sure. I'm talking words like grace and redemption and condemnation and judgment and holiness and truth and...well, you get the picture.

Not really a rant here, just a minor tangent...