See query. It seems all the more striking given the famous English lubricity of spelling (“ghoti–>fish”).
No idea, but the “ghoti” spells “fish” thing is a dumb joke more than anything else. I mean, I get the point: oh, that wacky English spelling! But English spelling is not flexible to that extent.
Leo Bloom post includes dumb joke.
And this time it even bears more than the faintest relation/purpose to point of post–now that’s the most surprising part.
ETA: 
Best I could find so far is that it was introduced via French in Middle English after the Norman Conquest.
This Mental Floss article goes into some detail about it:
Basically, before the Norman invasion of 1066, words like queen and quick were spelled cwen and cwic. The Normans changed the kw sounds to the French QU. When the French stopped pronouncing the U part of that and just turned it into a k sound they kept the QU spelling. English words borrowed from the French also kept the QU spelling.
The article goes on to explain where the French got the QU spelling from initially.
According to this, it all goes back to Latin. In Latin there were three ways to spell the hard “kkk” sound – the letters C, K or Q. On the other hand, the letter U had to do triple duty, representing U. V and W.
But the English, there were no letters K, Q, V, or W. That left C and the letter Wynn, which was eventually written to look like W. If you go back to Beowulf, you’ll see that Old English generally used the letters CW to represent the “kwuh” sound. However, the French used (and still do) the letters QU.
After the Norman Conquest in 1066, the French spellings gradually overwhelmed the Old English. By the time Chaucer started writing the Canterbury Tales (1387) in Middle English, QU had replaced both C and K to represent the “kwuh” sound.
Why do almost all English words with a Q always follow it with a U? Probably because we also have C and K to represent “kkk.”
It should be noted that the “qu” spelling that the French used comes from the Latin.
Qv got used to represent [kw].
C_ got used to represent all other [k] sound combinations.
K was used primarily in words borrowed from Greek, which used kappa to represent the sound.
And to slightly modify what kunilou said, the Romans used “v”, not “u” originally. “V” is easier to inscribe into stone. In English, we’ve assigned the various different sounds that “v” represented in Latin to “u”, “v”, and “w”.
Just to confuse the issue, in old Scots, you will find “qu” instead of a “w” in (presumably) aspirated “wh” words like what, while, and so on:
That spelling still shows up in some names, for example Farquhar.
Good thing he isn’t compensating for it. 
Just to be clear, though, while the French use the letters QU quite often, they do not represent the “kwuh” sound. Most often it’s just “k,” as in “quatre” which is KAH-TR.
That would be quheer, wouldn’t it?
Uh? The only person I ever worked with who had that name pronounced it “farker”.
This was addressed up-thread, where it was pointed out that the French used to pronounce it “kw”, but later refined that.
And of course there’s the silent “qu” in the Scottish name Colquhoun (pronounced “Cahoon”).
You had “the qu spelling”. I meant the “quh” spelling. That’s much rarer.
My favourite in that line is the village of Kilconquhar in the Scottish county of Fife – pronounced, I gather, “Kin-NEW-kher”.