Potty:
If someone is driven potty then they are being annoyed, frustrated,
bothered etc. by something that is probably of little real consequence.
I can't find an origin for this one but I guess that it comes from the
use of the word potter in the sense of "dabble", "wander about
aimlessly" etc. rather that of making crockery.
Ps & Qs: To mind your Ps and Qs is to be careful; cautious. The
Ps here are said to be pints and the Qs to be quarts. The publican
"chalks up" or "puts on the slate" the drinks supplied to customers;
they must be aware of how much they have drunk or their bills will be
unexpectedly large.
An alternative view is that P derives from the French pied=foot and the
Q comes from queue=tail(of a wig) and that the whole saying is based on
18th century court etiquette.
Another possibility comes from the split of the Celtic language in
Romano and Post Romano Britain; where the Celtic language of the north
softened the C/Q in comparison to that of the more
ancient version of the Celtic dialect in Wales and Ireland, hence when
speaking in Celtic, dependent on dialect the of
person you are speaking to, one should mind your Ps and Qs.
Bruce Kahl, a fellow "Origins" enthusiast, has offered more
explanations:
-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.
-An abbreviation of mind your pleases and thank-yous.
-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.
-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 Rowland's Knave of Harts of 1612:
"Bring in a quart of Maligo, right true: And looke, you Rogue, that it
be Pee and Kew."
Finally,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".
In truth, nobody is really sure what either P or Q stood for.
Pup: To be sold a pup. See Cat
Purple: To have a purple patch means to have an exceptionally good
period in, say, a game. The origin here is a little obscure but could
be based on the fact that Roman noblemen wore purple togas. They were
clearly exceptional people, hence the analogy. Alternatively the
emphasis may be on the patch since purple and other multicoloured areas
were sometimes set into ancient illuminated texts and other ventures in
order to make them look more distinguished than they truly were. In
Horace's De Arte Poetica he says "Often to weighty enterprises and such
as profess great objects, one or two purple patches are sewn on to make
a fine display in the distance".
