This Can't Be a Coincidence

On the stage/lounge/library that I set up in our high school, there is a pool table. It's possibly the world's worst pool table. There's a hole in one spot, one of the balls is actually missing a section of its hard covering, and the cues have pretty much completely lost their tips.

But it still gets used a lot, often by Cubby, who loves playing pool.

I can't do much about the covering on the table, but I did think maybe it wouldn't be too hard to replace the wonky ball and the terrible cues.

So this morning at 4:30, when I was awake but didn't want to get up yet, I was considering doing a search for cue tips to replace the awful ones.

Cue tips . . . Q-tips? Ohhhh. 

Surely that must be where the name came from, right? Because the Q-tip--that none of us use to clean out our ears, no way--actually resembles the tip of a pool cue.

However, when I looked up the history of Q-tips, I found that the company claims the Q just stands for quality*.

I like my name story much better, though, and now I will think of pool every time I use a Q-tip (but not in my ear, of course! never!). So there.

* I also found the original name for Q-tips was something that would definitely never fly now. How times, and word meanings, have changed in the last hundred years.