Did You Know? (continued)

...typesetters used wooden or metal blocks bearing individual characters and letters to create words and sentences, which were then inked and “pressed” onto the paper.  These letters were kept in two cases, one above the other, and the upper case letters were called that because, simply enough, they were stored in the “Upper Case”, while the small letters were stored in the “Lower Case”.

As if that weren’t enough useless trivia for one issue of the Relyco Express, we’ve got one more for you:  Ever heard the term “Mind your P’s and Q’s”?  That term also derived from the early days of printing and typesetting.  The wooden or metal letters that the typesetters used were, of course, mirror images so that they would transfer properly to the paper, much like a modern rubber stamp.  In many fonts, the letters “p” and “q” are mirror images of one another already (at least the lower case versions), and the “mirror image” factor made it easy for the typesetter to mistakenly use the wrong letters, since the reversed image of the “q” looked like a “p”, and vice-versa.  Hence the time worn admonition “Mind Your P’s and Q’s”.