Fun_People Archive
15 Nov
Mind your p's and q's.

Date: Wed, 15 Nov 95 11:57:05 -0800
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: Mind your p's and q's.

Forwarded-by: bostic@bsdi.com (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: cate3@netcom.com
Forwarded-by: Tommy Hughes <HUE@USCN.BITNET>

Mind your P's & Q's: Uppercase and Lowercase letters.

When mechanical printing was accomplished (90+ years ago), the printing
press master was created by arranging individual letters onto a plate and
locking them into place.  You'd have all the As in one bin, all the Bs in
another bin, etc. so you had 26 bins + punctuation. There were 2 cases of
bins of letters, one case contained Capitals, the other didn't.  The
capital letters were in the upper case, the others were in the lower case
(bin).  Since the printing machines forced the letters to be arranged
upside down to the viewer, and since the letters were in mirror writing,
it was easy to confuse an upside-down, backwards p with an upside-down,
backwards q.

© 1995 Peter Langston