This is completely off-topic, but I've been seeing this weird style of quotation marks occasionally for a while now. It uses two backticks at the beginning, and two apostrophes at the end: ``quoted''. If you're not using TeX, doing that will generally look pretty weird. So why do we still see it?
From the 1970s until about 2001, the common fonts on Unix systems drew those two characters as something approximating ‘ and ’. This gave us Unix users a simple and easy way to put ‘single’ or “double” quotes into our man pages, our web pages, our TeX documents, pretty much everywhere we would put text.
Unfortunately, the stupid losers at Microsoft and Apple never picked up on this, and eventually the glyph for the apostrophe was standardized as that ugly vertical piece of shit you probably see on your screen right now, which comes from the typewriter days when you would overstrike it with a period in order to make a shitty exclamation point, thus eliminating the need for one key on your cheap-shit typewriter; and the backtick was standardized as being an accent grave with no fucking letter underneath it, which makes a lot of sense when you're printing things out on a fucking dot-matrix printer with backspace, but not on a VT100, let alone a fucking window system.
Well, in the early 2000s, the folks at the X Consortium decided to standardize on making X-Windows apostrophes look like the shitty Microsoft Windows apostrophes, instead of waiting for the douchenozzles at Microsoft to catch up to the ASCII typography we had in the 1970s. So now instead of having shitty quotes only on Microsoft and Macintosh systems, we have shitty quotes everywhere, unless you use non-ASCII characters. (To be fair, all the glyphs looked shitty on X back then, so it's not like we were giving up some kind of Caslonian paradise.) The saving grace is that you actually can use non-ASCII characters now, and they will work everywhere with no problems. They look like this: âHello, world!â .
Anyway, the reason you still sometimes see the old kind of ASCII quote marks is that not every fucking document on the web gets thrown away in six months, because some of us fucking try to write shit that people will still want to read ten or twenty or a hundred years from now. When you see ``this'', you're looking back in time, to the days when characters were bytes and men were men. I mean, you’re looking back—oh, fuck it.
Confession: I ran them through "recode latin1..utf8" before posting to simulate a website encoding problem. It's not the fault of the website or your browser or my browser. This time.
Comments
This is completely off-topic, but I've been seeing this weird style of quotation marks occasionally for a while now. It uses two backticks at the beginning, and two apostrophes at the end: ``quoted''. If you're not using TeX, doing that will generally look pretty weird. So why do we still see it?
From the 1970s until about 2001, the common fonts on Unix systems drew those two characters as something approximating ‘ and ’. This gave us Unix users a simple and easy way to put ‘single’ or “double” quotes into our man pages, our web pages, our TeX documents, pretty much everywhere we would put text.
Unfortunately, the stupid losers at Microsoft and Apple never picked up on this, and eventually the glyph for the apostrophe was standardized as that ugly vertical piece of shit you probably see on your screen right now, which comes from the typewriter days when you would overstrike it with a period in order to make a shitty exclamation point, thus eliminating the need for one key on your cheap-shit typewriter; and the backtick was standardized as being an accent grave with no fucking letter underneath it, which makes a lot of sense when you're printing things out on a fucking dot-matrix printer with backspace, but not on a VT100, let alone a fucking window system.
Well, in the early 2000s, the folks at the X Consortium decided to standardize on making X-Windows apostrophes look like the shitty Microsoft Windows apostrophes, instead of waiting for the douchenozzles at Microsoft to catch up to the ASCII typography we had in the 1970s. So now instead of having shitty quotes only on Microsoft and Macintosh systems, we have shitty quotes everywhere, unless you use non-ASCII characters. (To be fair, all the glyphs looked shitty on X back then, so it's not like we were giving up some kind of Caslonian paradise.) The saving grace is that you actually can use non-ASCII characters now, and they will work everywhere with no problems. They look like this: âHello, world!â .
Anyway, the reason you still sometimes see the old kind of ASCII quote marks is that not every fucking document on the web gets thrown away in six months, because some of us fucking try to write shit that people will still want to read ten or twenty or a hundred years from now. When you see ``this'', you're looking back in time, to the days when characters were bytes and men were men. I mean, you’re looking back—oh, fuck it.
> and they will work everywhere with no problems
It's deliciously ironic that they do not display properly for me in your post (Chrome on Windows here).
Confession: I ran them through "recode latin1..utf8" before posting to simulate a website encoding problem. It's not the fault of the website or your browser or my browser. This time.
You should meet Kenny Tilton from comp.lang.lisp - the writing style of your comment made me think of him.
what work do your "fuck"s and "shit"s do?
They could be a typographer who is very legitimately angry at the whole state of affairs
They are effective at conveying emotional state.
Force of habit from writing too much TeX?
How else do you make `curly quotes' with ASCII?