Generally speaking, in decades previous to about the year 2,000, if one had a trivial question about some subject that one could not find the answer to by asking a friend, in a dictionary, or in a library, one simply learned to ignore questions like that, and move on.
with the internet, now such questions can generally be answered, or at least an explanation can be had as to why there may be no known answer, such as all historical records being destroyed in a disaster, or simply no-one writing it down.
Searching for why q-tips are named q-tips, however, simply leads to more questions, even taking language shifts into account.
tl;dr - "Wat?"