I learned an alternative way to ask "Why?" in the strangest place once. I was working away from home, and during that time, I was renting a spare room from a small family. We happened to be all in the kitchen at the same time when the teenage daughter had just baked her first cake.
It was a carrot cake, and she had some carrot-shaped icing to place on the top as décor. She casually placed it on the cake in a neat but fairly indiscriminate fashion. When she finished, her mother asked: "What was the rationale behind placing them like that?" The daughter replied: "There was none. I just did it."
Her mother then went on to explain that placing them strategically would have made it easier to cut the cake later as you wouldn't have to cut through the carrot-shaped icing and there could have been a carrot for each slice.
