A Question About the Question Mark
Why do you have to press the SHIFT button and then the question mark to get a question mark? Surely the question mark is used more often than the backslash. I have no empirical evidence to prove this, but if most people use a keyboard the same way I do (to post on their blogs, cruise the Internet via Google, and compose) then it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever why the use of the question mark is a two step process unlike the period or the comma.
While writing an essay the night before it was due, in her frustration, my college roommate vented about having to press SHIFT before being able to get a question mark and asked the question above (with various expletives that I have omitted). I never really thought about it until then, and now, six years later, I think I have part of the answer to her question.
Because it was originally a tool used by the Army. The Internet was created in 1969 by a U.S. government agency called ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) to communicate with themselves. Very likely there was a lot of code writing involved, i.e. high usage of backslashes, dashes, and periods, and minimal usage of the question mark. (This is all a hypothesis, keep in mind, so if anyone has additional information to contribute that would be wonderful.)
It was only in 1990 that researchers realized they could use the Internet to connect a web of stored hypertext pages and make them accessible to people all over the world. Enter the World Wide Web (www). By the time this all came about, however, the keyboard was already created and the question mark, though used more often than the backslash, was already relegated to a second tier spot.
This rumination was forged in the mind of a copywriter.
