I decided it was perhaps best to discuss the letters P and Q together if they need so much minding, and they obviously do.
I mean, just look a P go on, give it a good, long hard stare: it either continually waves the white flag of surrender or, if your ink gets all blotty, it waves the black flag of anarchy.
And after a cool appraisal of Q we can easily deduce that this risibly pathetic member of the alphabet is merely a O with its tongue hanging out like some kind of cretin reduced to a retarded vegetative state. Or it's a juvenile delinquent O who has drunkenly walked slam straight into a wall while smoking a cigarette. Call security and have this hooligan ejected immediately! This is why Q requires the chaperonage of U all the time. As I've said time and time again, the letter Q simply cannot be trusted.
P, of course, was the Greek 'pi', and the semitic 'pe' meaning "mouth"; consequently, when translating ancient Hebrew into ancient Greek you are pretty much stuffing a pie into your mouth. In the Roman world the combination of the letters P and C was shorthand for "Patres Conscripti", which meant The Senate. Today, alas, the mean "political correctness", which is the exact opposite.And in contemporary Britain, p is shorthand for the monetary unit known as pence, as in "How much is that mini Greek pork pi?" to which the hungry questioner will receive the reply, "It's 85p, squire."
Q, meanwhile, is a labial plosive (might've guessed) letter. Its Greek name is 'Qoppa', which - funnily enough - in modern Britain is the slang name given to the figure of authority who would arrest the letter for its persistant wrongdoing.
In Wodehousian language, the word "question" is always abbreviated to a simple Q, as in "Once again I was forced to confront the matrimonial horror that was Madelaine Bassett and pop the terrible q."
Anyway, that's P and Q ... so Q.E.D
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