I'm a court reporter, the guy that sits in a meeting and takes down stenographically everything that everybody says, and then if necessary makes a transcript of it. For the first 30 years of my career, if asked for a transcript I would dictate from my notes, on a dictation machine (where else?) for a typist. I would dictate ALL punctuation, all paragraphing, the identification of the speaker, and the Q. and the A. standing for "question" and "answer".

Hold on, I getting to the point. Have faith.

Now the Q. and the A. were dictated as "QUESTION" and "ANSWER". But there was a potential problem, which had been solved long since by my remote predecessors. One would dictate COMMMA and PERIOD and SEMICOLON to indicate punctuation, but never QUESTION MARK. Why? Because the finely tuned, highly trained transcribers would have heard that "QUESTION", and in the blink of an eye they would be on the next line with a Q. before they heard the word MARK. Then they would have sent my soul to hell before going back to erase and correct.

Therefore, the dictation command for the ? was INTERROG, short for "interrogatory mark".   

Thus I might dictate: QUESTION did you go downtown INTERROG ANSWER No COMMA I stayed at home PERIOD"

This would come out:
Q. Did you go downtown?
A. No, I stayed at home.

Conversely, if I were dictating something about some length of time, I dared not dictate "a period of time", because the word "period" would have triggered the punctuation mark. Therefore that time word would be dictated as "PERI-ODD".

There were other specialized dictation practices too, but that illustrates what was done.

Dave Oesterreich