Think “how do I implement a search engine whose interface is visible in the browser address bar?” This was a reasonable question on the early web. And that’s why they are called query params.

The question mark indicates you’re making a query. And the ampersand is a boolean operator. You could imagine query params implementing | in addition to &.

I think to non-techies the semi-colons are still more intuitive - I often see non-technical people mess up the ? and &, either by using just one of them or by getting them the wrong way around.