Q is for . . . Question

I have a question. Why do we need the letter Q?

Q is quirky, which is a polite way of saying it’s crazy and doesn’t make any sense. Look at it. It’s an O with a tail. It can’t travel alone, always has to have a “U” after it. And it makes the same sound as a K or a hard C, so it’s redundant. You have to look hard to find Q in the dictionary between P and R. It doesn’t even take up a whole page in the white pages of my phone book, and it isn’t there at all in the yellow pages. P goes straight to R.

We could say Q is “quaint,” which might be a snarky way of saying it’s old and out of date, like my Windows XP computer which was being stripped and its contents loaded into a new computer as I wrote this on my laptop. Querulous is how I feel about that. But the dying of my old computer left me in a quandary and forced me to go to Staples for a new one.

Q is quizzical, meaning it makes us raise our eyebrows and say, “Huh?”

Q sits way off on the upper left edge of my QWERTY keyboard because everybody knows you don’t need it very much, unlike D or I, which are right under my fingers. 

Q makes a body want to quit this alphabet challenge because what can I write about Q? I did come up with some words: quail, beautiful birds which I have seen wandering around my woods; quilting, which a lot of Oregon coast ladies are crazy about; quiet, which it is up here in my trees when the ocean isn’t smacking the sand in a hissy fit; quill like folks used to write with and dogs sometimes run into trouble with when they get friendly with porcupines; quote, which would require me to find somebody else’s words to quote; quarter, one-fourth of something or the coin I have stuck in my Wells Fargo stage coach bank that I can’t get open; and query, which is a pitch letter I could write about in my Writer Aid blog, but this isn’t Writer Aid day (Fridays). I keep coming back to my question:

What’s up with the letter Q?

Answers greatly appreciated.

 

Author: Sue Fagalde Lick

writer/musician California native, Oregon resident Author of Freelancing for Newspapers, Shoes Full of Sand, Azorean Dreams, Stories Grandma Never Told, Childless by Marriage, and Up Beaver Creek. Most recently, I have published two poetry chapbooks, Gravel Road Ahead and The Widow at the Piano: Confessions of a Distracted Catholic. I have published hundreds of articles, plus essays, fiction and poetry. I'm also pretty good at singing and playing guitar and piano. View all posts by Sue Fagalde Lick